A Lopsided Meeting of the Minds

To Nobel laureate James D. Watson, boredom can serve as the DNA of creativity.

By David Holahan

I grew up on Long Island in the 1960s, and I went by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory twice a day, to and from school, for four years. I knew big things were going on in there, just off the main road through the trees, scientific things, way-over-my-pay-grade kinds of stuff. Science and I never bonded: the annual pithing of the frogs in biology, capillary action, photosynthesis, and so on. It might as well have been the far side of the moon, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as far as I was concerned.

I ventured in for the first time just the other month. My new employers, Centerbrook Architects, have been designing the buildings for scientists at Cold Spring Harbor for decades. I was there to sit down with, among others, James D. Watson, the lab’s longtime director and currently, at 81, chancellor emeritus. To use the vernacular, Jim Watson, Nobel laureate, is one smart fellow.

In 1953, he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the genetic material that is responsible for how you and I develop, for our very identity, and in some cases...