RIP James Watson
James Watson, one of the great scientific minds of the past century, has died at the age of 97. In 1953, still in his mid-twenties, he and colleague Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. It was an essential precondition for just about all the advances made in genetics since that time. Later in life he was the subject of a moral panic due to some candid remarks on racial differences, and was stripped of many of his honors. As Ed Dutton has written in a book on Watson which I recently reviewed for Counter-Currents, this was our age’s equivalent of the 1633 condemnation of Galileo for voicing ideas disapproved by the powerful.
James Dewey Watson was born in 1928 and grew up on Chicago’s South Side, attending public schools. In 1943, at the age of just 15, he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he concentrated on zoology. He did not get the best grades, devoting much time to birdwatching to the detriment of his academic studies.
Watson graduated in 1947 at the age of 19 and went on to be a PhD student at the University of Indiana. The admissions officer made it plain to him that he would be left free to research whatever happened to interest him. This was perfect for a young man like Watson. As he later recalled, if he had been made to follow some set plan, “I might have grown bored with my thesis research and been obliged to wait until after my Ph.D. was completed, some three or four years, before experiencing true intellectual excitement. And by then I would have left the most thrilling problem of all—the DNA structure—for others to solve.” He obtained his PhD in 1950 at the age of just 22.
Watson was then a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, before transferring to Clare College at Cambridge University. In 1953, he and the English biologist Francis Crick (1916-2004) worked out the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. He later told his own version of how the discovery came about in a brutally frank memoir The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968).
Leaving Cambridge, Watson worked at Cal Tech before transferring to Harvard, as a biologist, in 1955. He was Professor of Biology at Harvard between 1961 and 1976. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his earlier research at Cambridge in 1962, in 1968, Watson became the director of the Laboratory of Quantitative Biology at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, a privately funded scientific research establishment. In 1994, Watson became the laboratory’s president. A talented fundraiser, Watson was responsible for making Cold Spring Harbor a world leader in biological research.
In 2007, Watson was touring England to promote his autobiography Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science when London’s Sunday Times Magazine published some offhand remarks of his:
[Watson] says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”
So many of Watson’s planned speaking engagements were cancelled in response to the publication of these remarks that he simply called off the book tour and returned to the United States.
The prestigious scientific journal Nature, which had published the original Watson-Crick Double Helix paper in 1953, denounced him in an editorial with such language as: “his notorious propensity for making outrageous statements”, “a track record of making distasteful remarks”, “on many previous occasions voiced unpalatable views tinged with racism and sexism”, “his views have finally been deemed beyond the pale”, “demonstrates a sheer unacceptable offensiveness”, “unpleasant utterances”, and “crass comments lacking in ‘sensitivity’”. Conspicuously absent from all this emotive verbiage was any concern with whether his statements were true or not.
Watson was relieved of his responsibilities at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Many members of the Board of Trustees must have known that Watson’s observations were sound, but they voted to force him to step down believing this was necessary to save the lab. A public statement declared that the board “vehemently disagree with his statements and are bewildered and saddened if he made such comments.”
In 2014 Watson was forced to auction off his Nobel Prize medal to raise cash. It was purchased by a sympathetic Russian billionaire for 2.6 million pounds and returned to him.
In 2019 Watson was asked whether his opinions on racial matters had changed. He said:
Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is genetic.
All hell broke loose a second time. Cold Stream Harbor Laboratory told newspapers that Watson’s remarks were “unsubstantiated and reckless […] reprehensible, unsupported by science.” They stripped him of his remaining honorary titles. The following year, during the Black Lives Matter protests, they even decided to rename of their graduate school because it had been named after Watson.
As with Galileo, none of this will have any effect on Watson’s historical standing as a pioneering scientist, but let us hope it will long be remembered to the disgrace of the age in which we are now living.
James D. Watson, R.I.P.