One of his colleagues declared him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met.” Those were some of the nicer words ever said about his personality.
But his failings as a human being did not diminish his achievements. Decoding DNA is one of the most influential scientific advancements in history.
Rosalind Franklin needs to be mentioned here. Her work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Known as the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry…
Watson doesn’t belong on the same level as Newton and Einstein. He was smart, but the discovery of DNA structure was a race between various smart groups (most notably Linus Pauling, who had an incorrect structure published before Watson and Crick’s). So they won the race, but the structure of DNA was inevitably going to be solved by somebody within 1-2 years.
Compare that to Newton and Einstein’s achievements, which were true quantum leaps (pun intended) in scientific knowledge that were not going to be achieved contemporaneously if they did not exist.
Because science is the process of discovery rather than invention, it’s reasonable to say that anything and everything would eventually have been discovered, just at a different pace. But your point is fair. Others were just behind Watson, or even influencing him directly, while others were ahead of their time to one degree or another.
It’s interesting to speculate how long it might have been until General Relativity would have been discovered. I suppose it might have been many decades. If so, it might place Einstein in a category far above the others.
His strongest competitor could be Mendeleev who (like Einstein) made intuitive leaps that others had not imagined. AI says: “Without Dmitri Mendeleev, the periodic table would likely have been developed much later, as other chemists like Lothar Meyer had a table almost ready, but it was missing Mendeleev’s predictive power for undiscovered elements. Other earlier attempts, like those by John Newlands, also existed but lacked the complete predictive framework of Mendeleev’s table. It could have taken decades or even a century, with a more gradual and less unified development, possibly without the same modern horizontal layout or the inclusion of noble gases until later. ”
Calculus was a race between Newton and Liebnitz, and other Individuals like Hooke and Halley were working on similar concepts in physics around the same time as Newton. Newton was first, but maybe only one or two decades ahead.
For truly transformative EFFECTS, it’s interesting to speculate about what really changed our existence.
If the evolution of the world could re-start at the beginning of the Cenozoic era, we would eventually have animal-powered devices, languages, radio transmissions, motors of some kind and planes of some kind.
But would we still have railroads, for example? They are everywhere. They blanket our planet. But is that simply an accident of history? Are they a necessary step in the technological development of transportation, and should they have lasted this long? Will they still exist in the future, or will their pathways all become walking trails?
We would still have religions, but would they last this long, or be as influential?
Would atomic energy still be far in our future? Or would it go the other way, and we would already have a post-Einsteinian physics that allows us somehow to defy the constraints placed on us by our inability to exceed the speed of light, leaving Earthlings somewhere among the distant stars.
Anyway, my original point was about the influence of Watson’s work, not its originality.
The applications of DNA are everywhere around us.
Much more so then GR. It’s main use is for GPS corrections and precision time keeping.
As an economist, one of the things I’ve been reading about lately is the idea,which I think originated from communist theory that technology is not neutral as seems to be the general assumption, but that it’s determined by the elites.
This was mentioned by a poster in another thread that a great deal of technology these days prevents people from actually owning their ‘own’ stuff: that people have subscriptions but the corporations still own the technology and can modify or shut them off whenever they want as well as charge ongoing rent for people to use them.
I’m not a conspiracy theoriest, so I doubt this started off as the plan, but I think it’s impossible to not believe now that corporations don’t focus on these subscription consumer technologies where they maintain ownership for new product development.
So, it’s also interesting to wonder what new ‘democratic’ technologies would be like.
Railroads are a HIGHLY efficient way to move heavy cargo around. Their long-distance passenger function has become obsolete in the United States (sorry, Amtrak), but not in Europe, where the long distances are not nearly as long. They are also still useful for mass urban transport in some cities, and mass suburban-to-urban transport in others areas. People like Elon Musk keep trying to re-invent trains, and come up with things that are stupid.
I am a university professor who is a geneticist. I was at a conference once in Cold Spring Harbor, NY, and he was there. I thought, hey, it’s James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA, I’ll go up and meet him. Another professor who knew him said “Don’t do it. It will end badly.” I went ahead and walked up and extended a hand and said hello and that I taught genetics and it was nice to meet him. He literally turned his back to me and walked away without saying a word. And his wife was there! So…later that evening there was a conference banquet. His wife asked me to come sit at her table, where his publicist, a very nice lady herself, was sitting. His wife then spent a considerable amount of time apologizing for his behavior.
Oh, and it’s well known in the genetics community that he stole much of his work from the real genius, Rosalind Franklin. He got the noble prize. She got cancer.
My girlfriend is a chemist, and her overview is “Watson was truly a genius – at selling himself and underselling the contributions of others.”
But it is Watson AND Crick.
Rosalind Franklin was the major problem, as noted in other comments. Especially troubling was the fact that he used her data without her knowledge, consent or acknowledgement, then dumped on her in his book, basically arguing that he was justified in appropriating the data because she was incapable of understanding what she had.
As Physics Today put it:
To his credit, Watson did later concede that the book, in which tried to replicate his impressions during the research, did not match the opinions he later formed of her contributions. But his book was a huge success, and the damage was done.
Ros hated being called Rosy.
That kinda shows just how little Watson knew about the creator of Photo 51, and yet he knew enough to write of her temperament: “I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down.”
And Watson does say in his book:
“One soon discovered that her judgment was excellent and that she was an extraordinarily competent and careful experimentalist.”
In the epilogue: “My initial impressions of her were often wrong, and I regret not recognizing sooner her contributions.”
When I was in graduate school, I heard rumors about how Watson would wear his Nobel medallion in bars to try to pick up women.
Jackie Vernon used to joke that he would pick up women at the beach by digging around them in the sand, saying “I think I dropped my Congressional Medal of Honor around here.” I guess that would work with any famous award: Nobel Prize, Purple Heart …
Well, ALMOST any. Maybe not a Grammy.
To look at Jackie you’d never guess he used to be a dull guy. And such a needless death, eating a piece of cherry pie at the automat, when the little glass door snapped closed and broke his neck.