American DNA pioneer and Nobel laureate James Watson dies.

American Nobel laureate James Watson, who revolutionized science by discovering the structure of DNA along with his colleague Francis Crick, died at the age of 97, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), where he worked for much of his career, announced on Friday (7).

His pioneering work in science was marred by racist comments, which forced him to resign from his position at the prestigious laboratory at the age of 80.

Watson told the British publication The Sunday Times that he was "inherently pessimistic about the future of Africa."

"All our social policies are based on the premise that their intelligence is equal to ours, when, in reality, all the evidence shows the opposite."

Marginalized by a sector of the scientific community, in 2014 he decided to auction off his Nobel medal.

Born on April 6, 1928, in Chicago, Watson was one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century thanks to his groundbreaking discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953, along with Crick.

Alongside Crick, and with Maurice Wilkins, he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for research that gave rise to modern biology and opened the door to new knowledge, including the genetic code and protein synthesis.

In 1943, at the age of 15, he won a scholarship to the University of Chicago.

In 1947, he graduated with a degree in zoology and subsequently enrolled at Indiana University, where he earned his doctorate three years later.

Watson later became interested in the work of scientists at the University of Cambridge in England, who were using photographic patterns generated by X-rays.

After transferring to the University of Copenhagen, he began his research on the structure of DNA.

In 1951, he traveled to the Naples Zoological Station, where he met Maurice Wilkins and observed for the first time the X-ray diffraction pattern of crystalline DNA. Shortly afterwards he met Francis Crick and began what would be a memorable collaboration.

Based on X-ray images obtained by Rosalind Franklin and Wilkins of King's College London, Watson and Crick began their race to decipher the structure of the double helix.

At Harvard, he taught for 15 years before becoming director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which has become a world center for research in molecular biology.

From 1988 to 1992 he was one of the directors of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), but his comments on race and obesity – he was also known for his sexism – led to his retirement in 2007.

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