Waters Corp. founder dies at age 95

Photo | Courtesy of Waters Corp. James Waters, founder of Milford lab equipment maker Waters Corp.

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James Waters, a Framingham resident and the founder of the $19-billion Milford laboratory equipment manufacturer Waters Corp., died on Monday at age 95, the company announced on Wednesday.

Waters was born in Nebraska, but moved at a young age to Framingham, where he would launch Waters Associates in 1958 in the basement of the Framingham Police Department. He and his five employees planned to build scientific instruments.

The firm's big breakthrough came in 1965 when the company licensed a refractometer from Michigan multinational firm Dow Chemical for analyzing plastics, and the product Waters built from that led to a spike in sales.

“While we mourn his passing, those who knew and worked alongside him remember Jim Waters as a brilliant and spirited scientist and businessman, who propelled the discipline of separations science with his revolutionary work in liquid chromatography,” said Udit Batra, CEO and president of Waters Corp., in the press release. “Alongside his loving family, our company and industry celebrate the legacy of this special man who always sought to ‘deliver benefit’ and whose work continues to catalyze innovation across the life, materials and food sciences, and today contributes to the fast-evolving science on COVID-19 vaccine development and disease research.”

Waters' biggest triumph for the company came in 1972, when he solved a problem for Harvard professor Robert Woodward, who was working on the synthesis of vitamin B12 and who had already won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965 for being the first to synthesize chlorophyll. At Woodward’s request, Waters accompanied a team to Woodward’s lab with a liquid chromatograph and solved the problem in the span of a few weeks.

Water's tenure as president of Waters Associates ended in 1979, when Burlington life sciences firm Millipore Corp. purchased the company. The company remained a division of Millipore, until Millipore split it off in a management-led buyout. Waters became its own public firm in 1995.

In 2017, Waters Corp. established the Jim Waters Society to recognize employees for scientific achievement.

A benefactor and trustee of Northeastern University in Boston, in 1984 Jim and his wife Faith Waters endowed the James L. Waters Chair in Analytical Chemistry within the Barnett Institute at Northeastern.