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It turns out that being a genius doesn't mean you're a nice person. That's a lesson that the Science Museum reinforced today as they cancelled a talk by scientist Dr James Watson, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for his work in discovering the structure of DNA.
Watson was scheudled to give a talk at the museum on Friday, but this was nixed after his controversial remarks in an interview with the Sunday Times. The 79 year old geneticist claimed that black people were less intelligent that white people, and suggested that people working with black employees were aware of this fact.
Watson's courted controversy in the past, once claiming that women should have the right to abort a fetus if genetic testing determined that the baby would be homosexual.
There's no denying that Watson is a genius, but there's also no denying that he's deeply prejudiced. It's debatable whether or not this affects his scientific ideas, but we applaud the Science Museum's decision. Scientific lectures shouldn't be a platform to spread prejudice.
Incidentally, the Dana Centre, the bit of the science museum that organises science talks, has very admirably been holding special events in October celebrating Black History Month. They had one just a couple of nights ago called Scientific Racism: A History. How obliging of Watson to provide a contemporary example.
If you're set on seeing Watson in person, he is due to speak in Bristol at the Festival of Ideas on 24 October. We expect the Q&A portion of his talk will be quite illuminating.
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Well, it looks as if the Enlightenment is finally over. People who speak out must now expect that their remarks will be judged not by evidence but according to their social acceptability. Those who dare to hold wacky beliefs can anticipate being silenced instead of their thoughts being rationally considered. David Irving learned the hard way that you can go to prison if you make statements held to be untrue. Now James Watson must realize that what he says about ethnic groups must conform to political correctness. Instead of demolishing error by facts, we shall muzzle those who dare to challenge the things we desire to believe or that our masters and controllers want us to believe. Somewhere Josef Goebbels is looking on and smiling; he understands.
Were is the evidence of his comments or are there just his personal experience living in America were these types of enlightenment have originated.Let us supose he is correct about his findings then why aren't Asians incharge of world affairs and domiant over whites since whites are not as intelligent as they are.Why did he and others single out the black man what is it about the blacks that create such fear in these people for if the blacks are so lowly why the debate.Go after you equals and prove your theories.Any white intelligent person knows what happen to the black man and his mind,culture etc.. The europes of the world knows about africa check your history Mr. Waston or is this something deeper sir.
Joseph Goebbels is smiling because he agrees with Dr. Watson. Totally different reason.
James Watson & his co-winner of the Nobel that year really owe a bulk of their DNA work to physicist Rosalind Franklin, who assisted them in the labs over several years in the 1950s by making the very first photographic image in history of a DNA strand, via Xray. She super-hydrated very thin & small biological samples to make them bigger & more flexible, then Xrayed them from different angles and via different fluids, lighting and temperatures. Her hard work resulted in the famous Photograph 51, a grainy black & white Xray of a DNA helix.
For all her efforts, she died of cancer in her 40s thanks to years of exposure to strong Xrays, plus the 2 male scientists she worked for/with claimed the findings for their own and denied she did anything special (esp. as she was only a woman). Since she had died, she was not eligible for the Nobel in 1962.
Years later, one of those 2 physicists publicly admitted that Rosalind was "shafted" and deserved much of the glory & recognition & fame for early DNA work. I'm not sure if James Watson was the one who 'fessed up, or the other guy.
In any case, physics & molecular biology back then was a pretty sexist place to work. Watson is racist now, and was sexist then.
#1, Why bother dignifying his views with a debate when we already have decades of solid biological and social science that disproves what Watson is saying? (For instance, many of the problems Africans and African Americans are saddled with are due to patriarchal policies that assumed they were inferior.) Just because he stole work form a colleague in the 1950s that allowed him to make a breakthrough in research, we should elevate whatever nonsense came out of his mouth to the level of hard research data?
He's not talking about research data here- just his own personal views. The man has been notorious for decades in world of biologists because he is unapologetically racist and sexist. When asked about Rosalind Franklin, all he has to say about her was that she was "terminally unsexy" (actually, he had far worse things to say about her in the last book, but along the same nonsensical sexist lines). There are a lot of people who refuse to work with him because of the open contempt he has for women and minorities. There are many horror stories about him over the years from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. Even in the last few years, he told a female Indian post-doctorate to "give up now" because "women and Asians are no good at science."
What he's saying now about blacks are long held beliefs, NOT conclusions based on data he's found through the study of genetics or bioinformatics. He has not been given funding to do any research to determine which races are more intelligent than others- he's simply speaking from observation, which is where the scientific process STARTS, not where it ends. Do you really think that a bioinformatic hunt to find out what populations could inherently be smarter than others is a good use of resources? Or likely? Perhaps during the Third Reich!
People give Watson FAR too much credit. Unless you're looking over his textbook "The Molecular Biology of the Gene," or reading one of his published articles in a peer-reviewed scientific journal BASED ON ACTUAL RESEARCH DATA, he really shouldn't be paid any mind.