James Watson: A Brilliant Scientist Who Helped Discover the Secret of Life
James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, has died at age 97.
His career was long and distinguished. Aside from making one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century1, he wrote an influential textbook and a best-selling popular science book, served as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for quarter of a century and helped to establish the Human Genome Project. Unsurprisingly, his contributions were honoured with numerous awards and prizes, including the Nobel Prize in 1962 and the Copley Medal in 1993. Watson was considered to be among the greatest scientists of his generation. Until.
In a 2007 interview with the Sunday Times, Watson made the mistake of giving his honest opinion about a controversial subject. Stating that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa”, he noted that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”. He also made the indelicate comment that, although he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.
Watson subsequently came out and said he was “mortified” that his remarks had caused offence, but the damage was done. He was suspended as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor. Forthcoming lectures were cancelled and honorary degrees were revoked. His career was essentially over.2
Despite becoming an “unperson”, in his own words, Watson was allowed to stay on at Cold Spring Harbor as “chancellor emeritus”. Yet even this title was rescinded in 2019, after the airing of a documentary in which Watson stated that his views on race and intelligence had not changed “at all”.
“I would like for them to have changed,” Watson declared. “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… it’s genetic.” At this point, any remaining chance of salvaging his reputation was gone.
It’s crucial to note, of course, that Watson’s views on race and intelligence are scientifically unimpeachable. The testing does show large average differences between Africa and Western countries. Meanwhile, surveys of experts working in relevant fields reveal non-trivial or high levels of agreement that genes contribute to psychological group differences. Even Watson’s longtime friend and collaborator, the great Francis Crick, was a closet hereditarian. In a 1971 letter to the biochemist John Edsall, he wrote:
Unlike you and your colleagues, I have formed the opinion that there is much substance to Jensen’s arguments. In brief, I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average IQ of American whites and negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment.
Long before the 2007 cancellation, Watson had been known for making risqué or provocative remarks. He once told a journalist: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad because you know you’re not going to hire them.” And according to biologist David Reich, he once asked him and fellow-biologist Beth Shapiro, “When are you guys going to figure out why it is that you Jews are so much smarter than everyone else?” As Richard Dawkins put it, he took a “perverse delight in shocking people”.
While such comments may not be to everyone’s taste, they show that Watson was not just another boring scientist, obediently conforming to the academy’s increasingly feminised norms. He was a force to be reckoned with. A genuine personality.
Watson’s work on the structure of DNA has certainly earned him a place in history, whatever his (less accomplished) critics might say. But perhaps what he should be remembered for above all is possessing that rarest of qualities: he wasn’t a coward.
Noah Carl is an Editor of Aporia where this article was first published.
- Contrary to some revisionist claims, Rosalind Franklin was not the one who discovered the structure of DNA. ↩︎
- In 2014, Watson put his Nobel Prize medal up for auction, and it was bought by the Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. Many people have claimed that he did this because he was destitute, but I have not been able to find any evidence that this is true. Rather, it seems he did it to raise money for science. Interestingly, Usmanov promised to return the medal, stating, “James Watson is one of the greatest biologists in the history of mankind and his award for the discovery of DNA structure must belong to him”. ↩︎
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The fascinating thing about the madleft is that it insists race doesn’t exist, while also insisting that whites are “world poisoners” who should be eliminated and replaced.
It’s almost as though the madleft is bonkers.
Apparently, as Richard Dawkins found out to his detriment, despite genetics and X and Y chromosomes, gender is a social construct and you can change yours at will!
And if you don’t agree with that statement, that’s literally hate speech.
How about that?
I’d like to meet someone who has successfully changed their chromosomes, no matter what surgery and pills they may have had.
What they mean is that white people are not allowed to talk about race at all, unless it’s to talk about how racist white people are. Non whites can have pride in their race to their heart’s content.
And that White people are innate racists, supremacists, privileged entirely because of their race.
More terribly uneducated and equally terribly full of themselves. The canonical claim is that human races were invented by white people to justify enslaving black people. But slavery existed long before white people came into contact with black people among white and black people. And the conventional distinction for Europeans alone knows a slavic, a germanic, a romanic and a celtic race which are further subdivided into different peoples. And that’s just the simple, traditional model. People who believed race to be the distinguishing factor of mankind, eg, Hitler, divided white people into a lot more different races, eg, on pages 436 – 439 of Mein Kampf where he bemoans the racial mixedness of the German people.
I wish he hadn’t.
You wish he hadn’t what?
Discover the secret of life?
Don’t worry, that’s just bit of poetic exaggeration. He only discovered DNA.
I wish he hadn’t discovered DNA, which opened a Pandora’s Box of genetic “editing”, “splicing” and “research” creating chimeras and all the horrors of humans tampering with God’s creation, including “test tube babies”, “three-parent babies”, “frozen” eggs & sperm creating babies from dead people, and all the rest of the Frankenstein research.
I see what you mean.
I sort of agree, for the reasons that you mention.
But the problem is: at what point does scientific progress become unethical?
Is the internet bad? Well, there is pornography and other bad things but at the same time, it allows us to see things our elites would otherwise keep hidden from us.
Is medical science bad? Well, it helped me survive to a ripe old age of 58 and there were some dodgy moments (pneumonia, etc).
Well, the answer to your excellent question “At what point does scientific progress become unethical?” is:
Scientific progress has NEVER been ethical, though researchers always claim that everything they do is for the betterment of mankind. Or the planet. For example, one news item years ago reported that biology researchers got funding to study the precise mechanics of bird song, so they captured large numbers of helpless songbirds and tortured them alive, keeping them immobilized while slicing open their throats to fit them with various contraptions in the lab and trying to make them sing. Then they killed them and cut them up to study further. It was horrific, and the results said something like “more research is needed” to discover the mysteries of how and why birds sing.
It is high time that scientific researchers became MORALLY ETHICAL, instead of running amok amidst God’s creation like a pack of wild dogs, which pleases only Satan and his human minions.
Very few things are inherently bad, its how they are used and/or implemented.
The EU was not inherently bad, neither is globalism, UN, NATO (when it was the USSR), WHO, NHS, BBC, environmentalism, multiculturalism and dare I say it BLM, Labour, LD, LGBTQ and even Greens.
Bad people, bad decisions, lack of empathy, lack of humanity, greed and other bad traits made all of these bad.
Had the EU remained a trading Bloc, guaranteed true democracy and not taken control of everything they could get their greedy hands on, might have been worth being part of. If it was for the benefit of all EU citizens, and not elites and favoured groups.
DNA evidence has locked away a great many evil criminals who would otherwise have not been proven guilty.
Good point.
And DNA paternity tests have exonerated many a man falsely accused of fathering children and then forced to pay for another man’s offspring, and to pay their immoral, deceitful mother.
“He wasn’t a coward”.
Well said Mr Carl. Neither are you.
My own view is differences are cultural which are not determined by race.
The race-baiters like to conflate the two, because then if anyone complains about migrating cultures being incompatible, and cause harm to society and economy, they can shriek “racist!” at them.
Where did cultures come from?
How would you account for differences in outcomes between races that persist across many generations where people of those races are all supposedly part of the same culture?
I would not consider myself a racist in so far as I like to think I treat people as I find them, but that is not IMO incompatible with observing group average differences and considering those as a possible factor in determining public policy – for example by favouring immigration (if we have it at all) from countries mainly populated by our white European cousins.
I believe culture came from environment which developed races through evolutionary pressure. Cold climates with seasons selected for people who were able to defer gratification, plan ahead.
I would also say that we have a multi racial society in the UK and we are stuck with that, and at least as far as those already in the UK legally go, we are best off just stopping talking about race altogether.
“No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.“
RIP James D Watson
Regarding this alleged disparity in intelligence between races. I’m not au fait with the research literature but were they comparing like for like? For instance: you’re going to see a lower IQ when studying people in poor African countries who haven’t had access to full time education for the duration of their childhood because they have to work to support their family or starve, and then to compare those to their ‘rich’ ( by comparison ) Western counterparts of the same age where being in education until 16yrs old minimum is the norm. South Africa would be an interesting one to look at, and perhaps someone on here has more knowledge and can speak from experience. Post-apartheid, have black people had the same access to higher education, and if their numbers at university have increased, is this based on merit or is even S. Africa infested with the dreaded DEI, with unis having to meet targets based on race? Has the black population’s IQ in that country increased because they now have more opportunities than decades ago? As an aside: I think it’s important not to equate academic qualifications with intelligence. Somebody can be perfectly intelligent but not academically inclined.… Read more »
IQ testing is bullshit because it relies on the voluntary corporation of the person who’s supposed to be tested. There’s no way to distinguish people who don’t want to answer a question correctly from people who cannot. Further, since only an exceedingly small number of white, black, green, blue or yellow people was ever IQ-tested, we don’t even really know anything about “average IQs” of any identifiable group of people. Someone who claims to be a scientist ought to understand that.
Yet further, did someone ever try another grouping? Eg, is the so-called IQ of poorer people generally lower than that of richer people and could it perhaps be that black people in the USA are, on average, poorer than white people in the USA? That’s probably something pro- and anti-black racists don’t really want to know but it would be an interesting question.
Yes that’s what I was trying to ascertain in my above post. Did they compare people of the same socioeconomic group? Even then there are many variables and how accurate are the results anyway? It’s no good comparing a kid living in a shanty town with his 7 siblings who can’t even access the basics, let alone the Internet and good nutrition, with a white kid who only has 1 sibling living in a gated community with all amenities.
So based on all this uncertainty I’m wondering just how fair this whole:”Black people have lower IQs than white people, because what civilization did they even build anyway?” is, to be honest. I think it’s more to do with the culture, quality of life and the opportunities and life prospects available to people.
Even dirt poor kids in England in years gone by had access to school up to a point.
Outside the joint complex of Europe and Asia, human civilisation generally nowhere progressed much beyond stone age. The Obas of Benin where kings of a stone age culture where ritual sacrifices of humans played an important part. So where the Aztecs rulers of Mexiko at the time to the Spanish conquest. But that’s probably not so much (NB: the following is a pure speculation of mine) because of the inherently lower ability of the people but rather, because it simply wasn’t necessary. Africa is mankind’s original paradise and contains a lot of the fairly rare places on the planet where humans can survive with minimal or no cloting. So, why would Africans spend a lot of effort on clothing themselves except for decorative purpose?
[This obviously much oversimplified.]
Just because Watson had a spark of brilliance (which relied on the shift put in by Rosalind Franklin, despite what the footnote says), doesn’t disqualify his subsequent ideas and remarks from attracting the opprobrium they deserve.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that Watson may have followed in the footsteps of Darwin, whose racial theories (Descent of Man) gave rise to theories, then practices, of eugenics (such as among the founding doctrines of Fabianism, forced sterilisations in the USA – until that nasty Mr Hitler upset the applecart). Even Dawkins was to ponder the utility of eugenics through “selective breeding” in an afterword he wrote for a book on “dangerous ideas”.
I wonder what he had to say bout the dangerous Covid mRNA vaxxes. And the involvement of dna. Did he say anything?