Famed biologist James Watson announced this week he is auctioning off his Nobel Prize medal, awarded for his work in decoding the structure of DNA’s double helix structure. According to Watson, he has become an “unperson” and “no one wants to admit I exist.” That’s false. Plenty of people are very aware that James Watson exists. He just wishes it for different reasons.
His exile from public life is the result of widely-held views that James Watson is a sexist and racist, which makes sense, because James Watson is a sexist and a racist.
He has made this abundantly clear since the earliest days of his career (for instance,see how he wrote about Rosalind Franklin in 1968), but the current wave of disdain traces its roots to comments Watson made in October of 2007. As a refresher for those who don’t remember or who aren’t aware, he told the Sunday Times 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 followed that gem by saying that while he understood the desire to say all humans are equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” Years later, it’s still shocking to read.
[Note: If you’re interested in why Watson’s views on race, genetics, and intelligence are so wrong, see this review of Nicholas Wade’s erroneous book claiming many of the same things.]
I would love to say that those comments surprised me at the time, but the truth is my respect for James Watson died about six weeks prior to that interview being published, at a dinner table in Austin, Texas.
In grad school, I helped organize a lecture series that has brought a bunch of Nobel Laureates to our campus over the years. It was an incredible privilege, we tapped unfiltered into the minds of some of the greatest living biologists. We never considered that we might not like what we found there.
In September 2007, our guest was James Watson. I can still remember my excitement, hovering around just to get a glimpse of this legend. I don’t know what I expected, maybe that upon shaking his hand, a conduit of knowledge would open between us, an enlightening touch not seen since the time of the Apostles. He gave an entertaining talk, plugged a new book he had written, and we headed off to dinner, just Jim and us, his herd of fawning young scientists.
Like all great screeching car wrecks, it came out of nowhere. A Latina classmate of mine came up to Watson to get her book signed. They exchanged a few words about her research, and as he handed her book back, Honest Jim told her how surprised he was she had made it this far, as her people weren’t known for their work ethic.
[Note: This is where I wish I had been the science journalism-minded individual I am today, because I would have an exact quote for you there, but I can attest that those words capture the exchange as accurately as I can remember]
Her “people”? Watson had somehow nailed two birds of jaw-dropping offense with one bigoted stone, simultaneously insulting both women and Latinos in a single unflinching swoop. He had muttered it so effortlessly. How many other times had this same scene played out with the same actor and a different audience? Minutes later, the few of us who had been around the table reeled in our slack jaws, my classmate was wiping away tears in the other room, and not one of us had expressed our disapproval to Watson. Hours later, as Dr. Watson made his exit, that had not changed.
That’s my biggest regret of the situation, that the offense went unchallenged. But it speaks to a larger issue at play when it comes to great scientists who happen to be horrible people (and really, it goes way beyond that). James Watson sat that day, as he had many days prior, in a throne of power built on his professional accomplishments, and that insulated him from personal criticism.
I realize there’s no logic to that statement, but I felt paralyzed by his stature, incapacitated by hero worship. My mythical Watson had just collided head-on with the real version, and I was concussed into some weird state that had me making excuses for one based on the achievements of the other. Unfortunately, silence doesn’t just ignore or excuse behavior like Watson’s, it reinforces it.
Thankfully, people aren’t being silent anymore, not with Watson at least. I’m proud of the reactions to his recent auction announcement, especially Laura Helmuth’s at Slate, and Adam Rutherford’s at The Guardian. It’s forcing us to reconsider how and why we make people our heroes, or even if we should. I wish I had seen this amazing recent advice from Michael Hendricks back in 2007 (thanks to Ed Yong for compiling those tweets).
Watson’s Nobel liquidation is an unprecedented move. To my knowledge no other Laureate has sold their medal. I wasn’t raised to wish ill upon any man, woman, or child, no matter their transgressions, but I am not fooled by Watson’s cynical, self-pitying decision to auction his prize. This is not a man asking for forgiveness and seeking for a helping hand, it’s a man begging for forgetfulness and extending a middle finger to those who disagree.
I realize that to people who experience this regularly, there’s nothing novel about my story or the feelings that surround it. I know it echoes countless, all-too-common experiences of privilege and prejudice. It’s just taken science a long time to face up to the fact that the rest of the world’s problems also exist here. Science may be a pure pursuit of knowledge, but it’s carried out by imperfect people.
With the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson made an incalculably important contribution to science. I’ve talked in the past about how much I dislike the genius worship and warped narrative of scientific progress that the Nobel Prize promotes, but the men and women whose names grace those medals absolutely deserve to be held in high regard for posterity thanks to their work in advancing humanity. It seems that James Watson is finally admitting that he doesn’t belong in that club.
I believe we are intelligent enough to hold these two competing thoughts in our head at the same time. We can view the scientific accomplishments of someone like James Watson with the merit they deserve, alongside his racist, sexist, wretechedly offensive worldview. Then we can grab hold of the latter, tear it out, and throw it in the dustbin, where it belongs.
If you want an uncensored version of the image up top, here ya go
BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE.
THIS MOTHERFUCKER ISNT EVEN REALLY THE FATHER OF DNA DISCOVERY
THIS WOMAN IS
Rosalind Franklin
“Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other. From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside of what was probably a helical structure.
She presented her data at a lecture in King’s College at which James Watson was in attendance. In his book The Double Helix, Watson admitted to not paying attention at Franklin’s talk and not being able to fully describe the lecture and the results to Francis Crick.”
