photo:  Jason Lieb and James Watson speak to high school students at UNC

        One student stood and told Watson that he and his collaborator, Francis Crick, held a mythological stature among students who aspire to be scientists. The student asked him what it felt like to be idolized in this way.

        "We had no groupies for several years ..." he deadpanned.  The 75-year-old Watson and now-deceased Crick are credited with discovering the now-famous double helix structure  of DNA  in 1953, when Watson was 24.

        Another student asked him what it felt like to win the Nobel Prize. "I went over there naïve, thinking I could marry a princess or something like that," he said. "I met a princess, but we really had nothing in common."  She didn't look like Audrey Hepburn, Watson said, and he didn't look like Cary Grant. Or Gregory Peck.  How can such a serious scientist be so irreverent?  Blame it on his DNA.

The Double Helix
        A new understanding of heredity and hereditary disease was made possible by the discovery of these two chains of alternating phosphate and sugar groups twisting around each other.

        DNA explains almost everything we are and do, Watson said, from his inability to draw or sing in pitch to his freckled Irish skin that just wasn't made to hold up for 75 years.  "At most things I am bad, but I do have a deep curiosity," Watson said. And to be a scientist, that is the one thing you can't do without.

The limits of intelligence
        Fifty years ago, Watson and Crick were in a race against other scientists to find the structure of DNA -- that incredibly long molecule coiled into every cell of every living thing.

        One of the reasons they won that race was not because they were smarter than their competitors, but because they understood that they were not so smart that they couldn't use help from a variety of sources, Watson told the students.

        Discovery happens not by accident but by the careful assembling of a group of people who are smart, but not carboncopy smart. You need people who know a lot about a lot of different things. And in the early 1950s, that was something that Cambridge Universities had that few other universities could match.

        For instance, the textbooks of the time included a theory about the location of hydrogen atoms in the molecule that was flat-out wrong, Watson said. He was not smart enough to figure that out, but Jerry Donahue, a chemist from Cal Tech whom he knew, was. He and Crick could never have found the base pairs if Donahue hadn't told them the textbooks were wrong.

        "So never be the smartest person in the room because if you're the smartest person nobody can help you," Watson said.

        Donohue's contribution was so significant that one could argue that his name should  be added to the Nobel, Watson said. Of course, the controversy over credit about the discovery of the double helix has focused not on Donahue but on another renowned scientist, Rosalind Franklin.  It was Franklin who took the X-ray of DNA in King's College in Cambridge that triggered for Watson what he called his "eureka moment." How Watson came to see that picture remains a source of controversy and intrigue to this day.

        And 50 years later, it is an inevitable question that Watson gets asked.  When asked about it by the students, Watson said part of Franklin's problem was "she didn't want to act as if she was in a race." "She didn't have this obsession," Watson said. "I was obsessed about DNA."

        Another competitor was Linus Pauling, a brilliant scientist who had discovered that some proteins have helical shapes.  "Because he was so smart he did not feel the need to talk to anybody, which hampered his ability to figure things out as fast as other scientists who worked together," Watson said. "As a matter of fact, he was overwhelmed by how good he was. I wasn't, and I'm still not because I know my IQ."

A passion to know
        One student noted that Watson wasn't much older, at 24, than many of the people in the room when he discovered the double helix of DNA, and asked him to describe what it felt like at the exact moment the light bulb in his head flashed.

        "It was a great moment. And it (the double helix) was so pretty." And Watson caught himself wondering if "something this pretty could belong to us."

        "It was a eureka moment -- from nothing to everything," he said. "It's a wonderful feeling of knowing you understand. That's the passion. You just want to understand."

        For those who don't have that passion, who think they want to go into science because it would be a good career, Watson suggested they try a different line of work.  "You've got to be in it because you are actually curious about something. That's the fundamental. You can't go into science to be famous. You go into science because you are curious. That has to be the driving force."

        Mixed in with the desire to know should be the will to find things out before anybody else. "If you want to be a scientist you've got to be competitive," Watson said. "You just can't do things at your pace. If it's important there is someone else doing it, and if he wants to do it faster than you he's going to get the answer first."

        He added, "The meek do not inherit the earth. You've got to push yourself."

        The advantage of youth is not energy, Watson said, but not being tied to preconceived ideas that may be wrong. "You are not defending something, so you can go anywhere you want."

        And that is why, when the 24-year-old Watson and 36-year-old Crick were competing against Pauling, they saw his age as one of his biggest handicaps.   He was more than 50 at the time, ancient for a scientist by their way of thinking.

        This past year, Watson discovered in a casual conversation with Pauling's daughter another irony: The day he and Crick found the double helix was Pauling's 52nd birthday.

The future
        Someone asked Watson if he had any qualms about how his research has been used in areas of genetic engineering.  The short answer: None at all.

        He described the attack on genetically altered food as "a complete fraud" perpetrated by people whose objections have more to do with capitalism than science. It Europe, people opposed to genetically modified vegetables have gone so far as to go out into the fields and destroy the crops -- an act of misguided morality that he compared with people who think it is OK to murder doctors who perform abortions.

        One opponent, when told about how the modified food was being used outside of Europe without any related health problems, responded, "I don't care what the tests are, I hate Monsanto. I don't want big companies controlling our world's food supply."

        As for genetic engineering in humans, Watson believes the potential benefits  outweigh the dangers.  "We're products of evolution, so I don't think we've reached the top yet," Watson said. "We can get better. It's going to be tricky and dangerous and we're going to be scared doing it, but I don't think it's a bad thing."

        If science can help people lead better lives, then it should do it. "The person who gets the perfect anti-fat pill will become richer than Bill Gates," he said.
 

The Watson and Crick Story:  The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix Structure
Watson, Crick, Pauling, Franklin, and others:  The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix Structure
The Watson and Crick Story:  Rosiland Franklin 's Role in the Discovery of the DNA Double Helix Structure
The Watson and Crick Story:  Race for the DNA Double Helix Structure
2003 Interview with James Watson:  The Discovery of the DNA Double Helix
Watson and Crick pose with their model of the DNA double helix at King's College in London
Stephen Hawking on DNA, evolution, and genetic engineering
Watson and Crick 's 1953 paper in the journal of Nature unveils the DNA double helix stucture