Tag: James Watson

‘Racist’ scientist forced to sell Nobel Prize medal

‘I am an unperson’

The geneticist James Watson, who has been ostracized since public comments about black African IQ in 2007, is to auction off his 1962 prize for discovering the structure of DNA. It is expected to fetch in excess of $3 million.

“Because I was an ‘unperson’ I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income,” said the scientist of the aftermath of the incident seven years ago, which forced him to retire from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he had worked for four decades.

“No one really wants to admit I exist,” he told the Financial Times.

Despite his reduced circumstances – Watson has not been invited to give public lectures since 2007 – the American scientist is not living his life out in poverty. He said he plans to donate some of the proceeds of the sale of the medal to the “institutions that have looked after me,” including his alma mater, the University of Chicago, and Cambridge, where he met laboratory partner Francis Crick, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize.

The 86-year-old Watson also plans to purchase art.

“I really would love to own a [painting by English painter David] Hockney.”

The reserve price for the medal, which will be auctioned off at Christie’s in New York on Thursday, is $2.5 million, and there has been speculation that the final value could easily surpass $3 million. Crick’s medal – auctioned off last year to Jack Wang, a relatively obscure Shanghai biotech entrepreneur – fetched about $2.3 million.

“The far-reaching aspects of their discovery affect everybody and are only being appreciated now,” said Christie’s auctioneer Francis Wahlgren.

“I think the guy is the greatest living scientist. There are a lot of personalities in history we’d find fault with – but their discoveries transcend human foibles,” Wahlgren added.

The sale of Nobel Prizes is a recent phenomenon, with Watson’s being only the fourth to go on sale – and the first while the recipient is still alive. The medal awarded to Aage Bohr, the son of Niels, in 1975, attracted a winning bid of about $50,000 in 2012. Notably, American writer William Faulkner’s 1950 medal failed to pass the reserve price at an auction last year.

But for Watson, this is not just a chance to acquire money, but also to “re-enter public life.”

“I’ve had a unique life that’s allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part. All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are.”

The iconic image of Watson and Crick giving a presentation on DNA in 1953 at Cambridge University.The iconic image of Watson and Crick giving a presentation on DNA in 1953 at Cambridge University.

Despite a long-standing reputation as an outspoken scientist who sometimes professed eccentric views – such as those linking sunlight and libido – Watson’s downfall was swift.

In October 2007, Watson said to the Sunday Times that he was “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.”

He later waded into even more dangerous territory, suggesting that anecdotal reports said that black employees were less intelligent, and that there were no talented black scientists who could be recruited to work in his laboratory.

While Watson’s racial theories of IQ have some academic support, such as in Richard J. Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s controversial book ‘The Bell Curve,’ this remains one of the most contentious areas of scientific research. Following Watson’s crude remarks, most of the scientific community turned on him, accusing him of prejudice.

It is a charge he rejects to this day.

“I am not a racist in a conventional way,” he told the Financial Times.

“I apologize…the [Sunday Times] journalist somehow wrote that I worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ – and you’re not supposed to say that.”

‘Africans are less intelligent than Westerners’

One of the world’s most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that “equal powers of reason” were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson’s remarks ” in full”. Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “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”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: “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.”

The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of ” scientific racism”.

Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism.

Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: “It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson’s personal prejudices.

“These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels.”

The American scientist earned a place in the history of great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s and formed part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.

But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: “To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.”

In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a “hypothetical” choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that ” stupidity” could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks.

Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: ” This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”

Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson’s remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: “It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint.”

Postscript: A week after this report was published in 2007, Professor Watson was forced to retire from this post amid an international scandal over his remarks. According to him, “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”