James Watson: ‘In a way, Éamon de Valera made me’

‘In a way Éamon de Valera made me,” says James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA in 1953. A decision made by de Valera in 1938 had a direct part to play in Watson’s later work.

De Valera had opened the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies because he wanted a young Ireland to have a scientific research centre of international repute. He needed high-profile people for the institute and in 1938 decided to invite Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, to come to Dublin.

If Schrödinger had not come, or if de Valera had delayed his decision by two or three years, Watson would most likely have embarked on a career in ornithology rather than DNA.

Watson was already an avid ornithologist and was studying it at the University of Chicago. “I was quite happy to have a career in animal studies,” he says, were it not for a talk given by Schrödinger at the institute about the challenge of understanding the genetic code that defined life.

Schrödinger's What Is Life was delivered in 1944 and was later published in book form. Watson read it two years later as a third-year student and was captivated. "I realised it was very important and it was the book that turned me towards biology."

The rest is history. He and Crick went on to discover the structure of DNA in 1953, and in 1962 received a Nobel Prize for their work, along with Maurice Wilkins.

But what aspects of his youth contributed to this historic discovery, one of the greatest of any scientific discipline during the 20th century? He puts it down to a powerful ambition. "I knew when I was young I wanted to be something," he told Life Science while on a visit to Dublin earlier this month. "It probably comes from my ambitious family of frontier shopkeepers."

Genealogists have tracked his family back to the early 1800s, when they first landed in New Jersey before moving to Kentucky, Tennessee and then, in 1837, Illinois.

Strong Irish links

James Dewey Watson was born on April 6th, 1928, to Jean and James Watson. He grew up in south Chicago. He is very aware of his strong Irish links, including his Irish grandmother on his mother’s side, Lizzie Gleason. “The genealogists say I am 52 per cent Irish,” he says.

“My grandmother was always there, and it allowed my mother to get a job at the University of Chicago. I never felt insecure,” says Watson.

His father was a free thinker who encouraged him to read, and his mother pursued her role at the university. “It helps if you have ambitious people on both sides of the family. I didn’t come from nothing.”

His father was a keen birdwatcher, and James took to it aged 10. He already knew what he wanted to do, however: “I wanted to be a scientist.” The early assumption was that it would involve ornithology.

His success on a local radio quiz show brought him to the attention of Robert Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, who decided to give Watson a scholarship. Watson entered university aged just 15.

“It was a big step in my education, and, at 15, having to read the first-year course about US history,” says Watson. “I had an education that was successful because it turned out a thinker.”

Like most US university curriculums, the first-year content was a mixture of subjects, but his view that science was what he needed to study was quickly confirmed.

He wanted to find an explanation as to how birds manage to migrate, but everything changed after reading What Is Life. He decided he needed to explain how DNA worked and he changed his courses to pursue this goal.

He also wanted to get things done. “I had the ambition. I would have tried for the presidency but by then I was a non-believer,” and this would have thwarted his election, he believes. “I could have gone into politics, because as a politician you can get things done.”

Secrets of genetic code

But the secrets of the genetic code were what really attracted him. He applied for graduate school to Caltech and the University of Indiana, the former turning him down. “Indiana accepted me and it turned out to be better because of who was on the faculty.”

This included 1946 Nobel Prize winner Hermann Joseph Muller, who had published extensively on the heredity molecule, and Salvador Luria, Watson’s doctoral adviser. Luria, Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey in turn shared a 1969 Nobel Prize for their research into the genetic structure of viruses.

Watson, now 87, retains his research connections with Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory and finds himself, as ever, in the midst of controversy. He has developed new ideas about how to beat cancer and it has less to do with DNA than with chemistry. His ideas have not been well received by the research community, but he believes we are on the edge of amazing new discoveries that will transform cancer treatments.

FORMULA FOR IRELAND: SCIENCE EDUCATION

James Watson has a simple formula for making Ireland a powerhouse of science and technology.

“The only future for Ireland is knowledge,” says the Nobel Prize winner, who has worked in basic research his entire career. “For me, the idea of education is to learn ideas and to ask the question why. Most people don’t ask the question. The essence of science is why.”

Science education cannot operate without investment and facilities. What Ireland needs to do is to find its brightest people and support them to ensure there is an expanding science base, says Watson.

Ireland’s higher education institutions need to keep producing highly educated graduates trained in a properly funded environment that supports research. “If Ireland educates its people it will survive,” he says.

He has a simple blueprint for keeping mind and body in shape. “I will be fine as long as I can play tennis three times a week and return a service at 100 miles per hour,” he says.

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN CANCER TREATMENT MAY BE WEEKS AWAY, WATSON BELIEVES

Controversy is seldom far away when James Watson is about – from the early days, after he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA, to the present, with the sale of his Nobel Prize medal.

And he is running counter to the general view about how to win the battle against cancer, with radical ideas that contradict current understanding.

Watson was never one to hold his tongue if he felt he had something to say. This has landed him in hot water occasionally, but he has lost none of his feistiness when it comes to defending his science.

In fact, he puts 2015 down as one of the most exciting years in his long research career since his first – controversial – glimpse of crystallography data collected by Rosalind Franklin and shown to him by Maurice Wilkins. This was the moment the penny dropped and Watson concluded DNA was probably a double helix.

He compares this breakthrough moment to the results coming from two phase-three clinical trials, so convinced is he that a breakthrough is about to happen in cancer treatment.

“I think we just might see a big change with new drugs that have an unexpected power,” he says. “This is one of the best years of my life in terms of excitement.”

It has taken 40 years of involvement in cancer research to come to his current view on how to beat cancer, he says.

“The current way you cure cancer is you kill the cells with drugs or immune therapy. The big thing offering hope is the immune therapy approach, but its effectiveness slows down and begins to block the immune system,” he says. But use of immunotherapy in cancer is still some way off, he says. “The best way to stop it is to avoid it. One simple way is exercise: it gives you a 30 per cent reduced risk of cancer. The real question is: what does the exercise do?”

Similar reductions in cancer risk have also shown up in the area of diabetes research, he says. They found that people taking metformin, a drug used for type 2 diabetes, gave those using it a 30-50 per cent reduced cancer risk.

At this point, however, Watson begins to counter current thinking on oxidants and antioxidants in the body. Exercise produces reactive oxygen, and reactive oxygen kills cells, including cancer cells, he says.

The reactive oxygen kills off the cancer, and typically you have a balance between oxidants and antioxidants, he says. “The real issue is to have more oxidants than antioxidants. But people are afraid of oxidants. They are seen in neurodegenerative diseases, but exercise produces them.”

The answer is not to increase antioxidant levels but to increase oxidant levels in order to enlist them in the fight against cancer, he believes.

He argues that cancer research has become too dominated by genetic studies. “They are all looking at DNA to understand cancer. They need to look at the biochemistry, the chemistry behind what is going on.”

He decided to buy shares in the company behind the two drug clinical trials, and he won’t have long to wait to see if it was a wise investment. “We will know in six weeks. I really believe in it,” he says.

And that Nobel medal? It was purchased by billionaire oligarch Alisher Usmanov for more than $4 million, who then handed it back to Watson at a ceremony in Russia in late June. Of this, Watson paid $1 million in tax, gave more than $2 million to charity and to research, including in Ireland, and kept the rest for use in his later years, he says. This enabled him to feed his passion for tennis by attending the final matches in this year’s Wimbledon championship.