New York, 8 November 2025 (dpa/MIA) - World-renowned scientist James Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for helping discover the structure of DNA, has died at the age of 97.

Watson's death was confirmed on Friday by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he worked for decades. In 2007 he retired from the prestigious laboratory in New York State after making racist comments.

Watson, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, made the ground-breaking 1953 discovery that the structure of DNA was a double helix, a turning point in modern medicine and molecular biology.

Watson became the head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1968, turning it into a major centre of cancer research. He also expanded its work into plant biology and neuroscience.

In 2007, Britain's Sunday Times published an interview with Watson in which he suggested that Black people are less intelligent than white people.

The researcher subsequently resigned from his position as chancellor of the laboratory and also withdrew from public life. He later repeated these remarks. The laboratory severed all remaining ties with him.

Photo: EPA