I first met James Watson, who died last week at the age of 97, when he was the Director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. I was still a relatively young PhD student at Notre Dame, but had been lucky enough to be accepted into an intensive laboratory and lecture course on the “Neurobiology of Drosophila” offered by the Laboratory in the summer of 1988. Watson was a larger-than-life presence there, an idol of the emerging field of molecular biology to me and my co-students.

Late on the last night of our course, I drove my old VW Diesel Rabbit down to the swampy inlet behind the lab building that had been our home for that summer, opened the car doors and cranked up the stereo. An alcohol-fueled search for the biggest Limulus crab in the knee-high muck ensued. The combo of loud crab hunters and the pounding beat of Oingo Boingo music enticed the famous Director from his home to see what the ruckus was. I was sure my career was over, but he was gracious in asking us to tone it down. “What a great person!” I remember thinking at the time.

Sadly, it turned out that Watson had several far less gracious moments in his life that changed my opinion, most of them noted in the recent obituaries. He publicly made many outrageous statements that suggested serious streaks of misogyny, racism and homophobia, though he would insist he was misunderstood or his statements were taken out of context. Although these lamentable incidents dethrone him as an idol, they do not completely negate his work with Crick in the early 1950s in piecing together a model of DNA’s structure (with the caveat of how and where they obtained some of the information they needed to get there).

It strikes me that not only were the discoverers idolized early on by me and many others, but the object of their study was — and still is in the eyes of many — also regarded as an icon. One can kind of understand that: The double helix structure looks pretty cool (to the point of a marketed “DNA” cologne packaged in a double-helical bottle). And yes, it is an elegantly simple and clever way to digitize and store information for passing on to the next generation. It is also relatively easy to work with in the laboratory, at least compared to other, more “delicate” life molecules like proteins and metabolites.

But DNA, like its structure-solvers, does not live up to its unrealistic reputation. Your genome, i.e., the total DNA in your cells’ nuclei (with a bit in the mitochondria), is not the “Book of Life,” the “Secret of Life” (Watson), or even a set of complete instructions for making you. In fact, your genome is more like an IKEA parts list with incomplete, missing, or undecipherable assembly instructions.

But because of its past iconic attributions, DNA has also given many people the false idea that genes are destiny. Indeed, many companies that sell people DNA tests rely on that notion to get people to buy what is, again, essentially just a parts list. They suggest that if you have certain mutations in certain genes, you are inevitably going to develop specific diseases like dangerous cancers, cardiovascular failure, dementia, blindness and so on. Conversely, they suggest that if you get “good” versions of certain genes, then you are bound to grow up with favorable IQs or musical abilities or vitality. This has been deplorably interpreted by some people as being members of a genetically “superior” race. Such genetic determinism is categorically false, despite being very much still in vogue in places as high as the current West Wing.

What matters most here are not the individual genes and their variations (mutations), but how all of them interact in increasingly intricate networks and circuits, both with each other and with the environmental factors pressing in on us from all sides. Solving the DNA structure was only a first glimpse of the bewildering universe of our biology, a particular moment when imperfect humans discovered something fundamental about life but not sufficient to explain it; an event and individuals worth noting but not exalting.

Fintan Steele is an ex-Benedictine monk and priest with a Ph.D. in biology/genetics. He spent most of his life in science communications, including scientific publishing and, most recently, for biopharma and academic centers. He and his husband live in Boulder County. Email: fsteele1@me.com.