A Diagnosis

The day before James Watson arrived to deliver the 2013 Michael Davys Lecture in Oxford, I received an email from his personal physician in New York asking me to arrange for him to be seen by ‘one of your best surgeons’ to remove a skin tumour. Since I had invited Watson to Oxford, it seemed I was also now responsible for his medical treatment.

Fearing catastrophe, I asked Peter Ratcliffe for advice. ‘What we need is a diagnosis,’ he said, and recommended four dermatologists. Two never answered my call, one was dead but the last said he could squeeze Watson into his clinic a couple of days after the lecture.

The plane carrying the world’s most famous biologist to what I imagined would be his premature death was by now fast approaching Heathrow Airport, from where two students collected him and his wife, Elizabeth, and drove them to Merton College where I had arranged for them to stay. Merton had better food than most colleges and guest rooms whose medieval features appealed to American visitors.

That evening, however, the porter had locked the gate and taken a short walk within the college, whose thick walls prevented cellphone calls from Watson and the students getting through. Watson told the students to take him to the Randolph Hotel but it was fully booked. By the time I got him into the college, Watson’s mood was not the best, but it was about to get a lot worse.

Instead of the guest room, out of consideration for Watson’s age (he had recently turned 85), the college had booked him into one of the student rooms, so he wouldn’t have to climb the steep, narrow steps to the second floor (he played tennis almost every day). The room had no detectable heating and few furnishings apart from its single bed, on which the Watsons sat. He looked up at me and said: ‘This is mean.’

At that moment the porter returned with a ham sandwich in a paper bag. Hiding this behind my back, I had a quick discussion with the porter (who said he’d found out from the internet that Watson was quite famous and probably deserved better accommodation) and managed to find a vacant guest room.

On the way upstairs, I told Watson I had found him the best surgeon in Oxford and booked him into a private clinic in a few days’ time. Without hesitating, he told me that wouldn’t work because he had to go to London for the unveiling of a blue plaque on the house where he had once lived. I would have to arrange for a surgeon to see him the day after his lecture. He also said I wasn’t to mention the skin problem to his wife.

He wasn’t hungry, at least, having eaten on the plane, so I stuffed the paper bag with the uneaten ham sandwich into a bin and headed home, contemplating what I’d say to reporters to explain why I’d let James Watson die.

The balcony in Merton’s T.S. Eliot Theatre was occupied entirely by the press when Watson arrived. He stood by the podium for a few minutes until the camera flashes abated and then began talking. His subject was the genetics of mental illness, a topic in which he had a personal interest because one of his sons had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

After a wandering preamble about the history of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his first slide was all text, from ceiling to floor, without margins. Glancing at the slide for a moment, he started talking about something unrelated to the words on the screen. After going on in this vein for fifteen minutes, with slides and speaker continuing to disagree on what they wanted to communicate to the audience, Watson showed a slide that acknowledged and thanked the Cold Spring Harbor scientists who’d contributed to his talk. The lecture appeared to be over. Cameras flashed once more. Watson gazed at the balcony, peered at the slide, advanced to the next and continued talking. By the time he finished, about an hour later, there had been at least three acknowledgment slides.

Merton made up for the ham sandwich of the previous evening with a three-course meal in a private dining room. Most of the geneticists I had asked to dinner had turned down the invitation, on the grounds that they did not want to be associated with someone holding Watson’s views (Cold Spring Harbor broke all ties with him a few years later, condemning his ‘misuse of science to justify prejudice’), but he still had some friends in Oxford. He sat opposite me, laughing loudly and drinking Merton’s best wine, unaware that I hadn’t found anyone to operate on him the following day. I shared my worries with a colleague, who told me there was an NHS dermatology clinic opposite the Centre for Human Genetics that Watson was scheduled to visit.

The next day I drove Watson from Merton to the Centre for Human Genetics, left him to talk at length to a group of students, and walked over to the dermatology clinic. The NHS staff let me speak to the consultant running the clinic who agreed to see Watson. Later that day, sitting in the waiting room, Watson looked no different from any of the other elderly men waiting to have their squamous or basal cell carcinomas examined.

An hour later, the tumour removed, a small lesion in his leg sewn up, Watson smiled as he waited for the car to take him to London. He thanked me for looking after him and I waved goodbye, hoping never to see him again. The dermatologist caught me as I left to tell me the tumour he’d cut out was benign. Then a thought occurred to me: could I have some of the tissue to sequence its DNA? Watson died this month at the age of 97. There’s probably still a small piece of his skin somewhere in a freezer at the Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford. I don’t suppose he’d mind.