The DNA of cancer

“I feel about cancer as I did about DNA in 1952,” said James Watson. “That is, that we have a realistic chance of big success, but we really have to keep at it.” Asked what people should expect of genetic research in the next ten years, he said firmly: “A cure for cancer.”

Watson, together with Francis Crick, discovered nearly 60 years ago that the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information from one generation to the next, took the form of a double helix. Their publication of that conclusion in April 1953 won them, together with Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1962, and opened the gates to the genetic revolution. Over four decades, Watson built up Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in Long Island, New York, into one of the world’s leading cancer research institutes. In London in March, ahead of a talk to the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), he said that his prime interest in genetic research is still overwhelmingly a cure for cancer.

At the moment, he said, it’s fair to say, as people tend to do, that “Every type of cancer is different, so it has to have a unique drug to cure it, and won’t that be very expensive? The answer is probably yes.” But he takes issue with the common view that “late-stage cancer is hopeless and we have to catch it early. That’s crap, the same crap as a psychiatrist saying that if only I catch the disease early, I can stop it,” although he added, laughing, “if you take a lot of marijuana, you will hasten the day that you get schizophrenia [if you are genetically disposed to it].”

His argument is that “if you go for late-stage cancer, it might just prove easier to cure than early-stage.” He suggests that it may eventually be possible to identify the characteristics which all cancer cells share. “Late-stage cancer is almost indistinguishable from stem cells. All those cells want to do is to divide. And these stem cells have a vulnerability. Because all late-stage cancer is sort of like stem cells, eventually one medicine might cure all.

“In an ideal world,” he added, “you wouldn’t have a woman having mammography every year.” Even when cancer is identified early that detection is traumatic, he pointed out, while not all disease progresses to a life-threatening level. It would be better, he argued, to wait until a later stage of the disease, if you were confident that this could be treated.

Some oncologists and patients make the obvious point that we are not in an ideal world, and that this goal is not yet within reach. But few would disagree with Watson that the sequencing of the human genome laid the ground for understanding the mechanisms of cancer, “a genetic disease, a mistake in copying DNA.” He told his London audience that “you couldn’t be successful as a scientist unless you were more optimistic than the facts warrant,” adding: “I am lucky that I was born optimistic.”

He has a personal interest in the subject because, at 83, “I have low-grade prostate cancer.” Having “little sense that I would die from it in the next five years,” he decided not to pursue surgical or hormonal treatments but, among other things, take vitamin D supplements and anti-inflammatory pills. “We don’t really understand the mechanism of vitamin D,” he said. “All we know is that those with high vitamin D levels will be cancer-free for longer. Something is controlled by it; whether that is important, or super-important, the next few years may show.”

If enough funds are spent on research, that is. He credits the ICR and its partner organisation the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust with “some of the best cancer research today” and insists that “Europeans don’t have to go to the United States to be good scientists.” But he laments that, everywhere, administration is soaking up funds for science and biology is losing potential researchers to finance, law and IT. “It doesn’t have the allure,” he said. He has described President Barack Obama as “a very intelligent man who has absolutely no knowledge of science.” Calling for cancer research to be stepped up to “industrial scale,” he added: “I’m 83, and I want to cure cancer. That’s the only story.”

It isn’t, of course, the only story about Watson. Often quoted, as the “father of DNA,” on every conceivable aspect of genetics, he caused a storm in 2007 by telling the Sunday Times that western policies were wrongly based on the premise that black people were as intelligent as white. The remarks led him to resign his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory (he remains chancellor emeritus). Watson has said that the report misrepresented him.

He now avoids discussion of race and intelligence, although not intelligence itself, and predicts (he likes predictions with dates) that within five years, researchers will find genes which determine at least some aspects of intelligence. There are, he explained, “only 75 mutations that distinguish you from your parents.” Researchers looking for genes for intelligence or, say, musicality should look for a child who is exceptional compared to its parents in these abilities, as that will signal a mutation in its genetic inheritance, and point the way to identifying the gene responsible.

“Francis Crick was a mutant,” he said cheerfully, meaning that his Nobel colleague was exceptionally bright. “His parents were ordinary, they were like MPs [laughing], their success did not come mainly through their desire to think about ideas, not a broad intellectual curiosity.”

It would be hard to fault him on his own curiosity, at least. In London, which he praised for its vitality, diversity and “better looking people than in New York,” he and his wife had been to see Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’s play about the prejudice that lurks within apparently liberal people. He missed some of the “vulgar” lines, he said, but loved the acting and bought the script afterwards. He moved on to praise Orson Welles’s climactic speech against the death penalty in the 1959 film Compulsion, disclosing that Welles was “my second cousin once removed.” His father’s uncle helped bring up Welles in northern Illinois after the film director was orphaned.

He feels more Irish than Scottish, he said of his own biological inheritance. Earlier that week he had cheerfully pronounced that “the curse of the Irish was ignorance not stupidity.” Gesturing at the FT, carrying the latest instalment of the Irish debt problems, he remarked the Irish should tell the bankers to bear the losses.

His own IQ, he said, is about 120 or 125, a level he called “ordinary.” Asked what he would have done had his IQ been even higher, he paused, and then offered: “Probably exactly the same.”