James Watson: Scientist loses titles after claims over race
Source: BBC
Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence.
In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist's remarks were "unsubstantiated and reckless".
Dr Watson had made similar claims in 2007 - and subsequently apologised.
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779?ocid=socialflow_twitter
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)Anyone who has ever taken a biology class has heard of the names. This is unbelievably sad.
FreepFryer
(7,077 posts)Shoulda stuck with the science, Jimmy.
jpak
(41,758 posts)Kind of Blue
(8,709 posts)clementine613
(561 posts)Is there precedent for that?
Rollo
(2,559 posts)bobbieinok
(12,858 posts)obamanut2012
(26,087 posts)And should be rewarded with it posthumously.
She contributed MUCH to DNA/RNA research, and her work was basically hidden, and Crick and Watson claimed much of her work as theirs.
Photo 51 is probably the most well-known of her work, although it's just the tip of the iceberg:
[link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File hoto_51_x-ray_diffraction_image.jpg|
tinrobot
(10,909 posts)Sadly, Franklin died in 1958. The Nobel for DNA was awarded in 1962 - after she passed.
dalton99a
(81,558 posts)Botany
(70,549 posts).... Watson and Crick took credit for her work for years.
Rollo
(2,559 posts)Franklin was extremely meticulous and wanted to gather all the evidence possible before she published her results. Watson basically stole her results and beat her to it. I think one show about it said that Crick wouldn't speak to Watson for many years because he resented Watson's grandstanding with the book "The Double Helix".
Watson relied on his intuition about the structure and he was lucky he was right. He was helped in this because Linus Pauling had already made a huge blunder in publishing that DNA was a chemically unlikely triple helix.
My opinion is that no matter how gifted the scientist, their expertise is generally limited to one field and it does not make them an expert on unrelated matters, such as Watson's ill-considered opinions on race. But society seems to expect scientific geniuses to be geniuses about everything, and it sounds like Watson embraced that hubris. Watson did know how to play scientific politics.
Grokenstein
(5,727 posts)Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)Paladin
(28,268 posts)Laffy Kat
(16,385 posts)And not especially brilliant either. Watson and Crick too way too much credit away from Franklin. He's got this coming, IMO.