All,
What is and has always been the fundamental cause of the
heinous doctrine and practice of white supremacy and its savagely
criminal defense and justification of slavery, genocide, colonization,
and mass murder generally in the so-called "modern world" since the 15th
century?
The blatantly obvious answer as always can be found in
the following article below of course and the continued relentless
assertion, support, and rationalization of PSEUDO SCIENCE or what is
better known and clearly understood as LIES. The BIG LIE in the
so-called "scientific world" is precisely what moral and intellectual
cretins like Joseph Goebbels and Dr. James Watson and their many
colleagues have always shared in common with their millions of acolytes
and fellow LIARS who continue their murderous legacy today. Stay tuned
because as fascism continues to spread exponetially across this society
and the rest of the globe these white supremacist assertions and the
endless articles and the ongoing flood of high profile reports and investigative
journalism about them will become even more apparent than they already
are...
Kofi
James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race
The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded
pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s
right, a new documentary finds.
by Amy Harmon
January 1, 2019
New York Times
January 1, 2019
New York Times
"Decoding
Watson," a new film about Dr. James D. Watson explores the gulf between
his scientific brilliance and his views on race.CreditCreditMark Mannucci/Room 608 Inc.
It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of
modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting
that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.
In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the
double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist 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.”
Moreover, he added, although he wished everyone were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Dr. Watson’s comments reverberated around the world, and he was forced
to retire from his job as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory on Long Island, although he retains an office there.
He apologized publicly and “unreservedly,’’ and in later interviews he
sometimes suggested that he had been playing the provocateur — his
trademark role — or had not understood that his comments would be made
public.
Ever since, Dr. Watson, 90, has been largely absent from
the public eye. His speaking invitations evaporated. In 2014, he became
the first living Nobelist to sell his medal, citing a depleted income
from having been designated a “nonperson.’’
But his remarks have
lingered. They have been invoked to support white supremacist views, and
scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on
social media.
Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of
M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made
to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome
Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized.
“I reject his views as
despicable,” Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. “They have no place
in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m
sorry.’’
And yet, offered the chance recently to recast a
tarnished legacy, Dr. Watson has chosen to reaffirm it, this time on
camera. In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson,’’ to
be broadcast on P.B.S. on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views
about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed.
“No,’’ Dr. Watson 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 I.Q.
tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.’’
Dr. Watson
adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and
whites’’ and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful
for schizophrenics,’’ he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens
with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists,
we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better?”
Dr.
Watson’s remarks may well ignite another firestorm of criticism. At the
very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take
the measure of the man: How should such fundamentally unsound views be
weighed against his extraordinary scientific contributions?
In
response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director
of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on
intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to
arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”
Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr.
Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate’’ statement would be based.
“It
is disappointing that someone who made such groundbreaking contributions
to science,’’ Dr. Collins added, “is perpetuating such scientifically
unsupported and hurtful beliefs.’’
PHOTO: Dr. Watson, right, and
the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis Crick, in 1953.CreditA.
Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius College/Science Photo Library
Image
Image
PHOTO: Dr. Watson, right, and the co-discoverer of the double-helix, Francis
Crick, in 1953.CreditA. Barrington Brown, Gonville and Caius
College/Science Photo Library
PHOTO: Dr. Watson is unable to
respond, according to family members. He made his latest remarks last
June, during the last of six interviews with Mark Mannucci, the film’s
producer and director.
But in October Dr. Watson was hospitalized following a car accident, and he has not been able to leave medical care.
Some scientists said that Dr. Watson’s recent remarks are noteworthy
less because they are his than because they signify misconceptions that
may be on the rise, even among scientists, as ingrained racial biases
collide with powerful advances in genetics that are enabling researchers
to better explore the genetic underpinnings of behavior and cognition.
“It’s not an old story of an old guy with old views,’’ said Andrea
Morris, the director of career development at Rockefeller University,
who served as a scientific consultant for the film. Dr. Morris said
that, as an African-American scientist, “I would like to think that he
has the minority view on who can do science and what a scientist should
look like. But to me, it feels very current.’’
David Reich, a
geneticist at Harvard, has argued that new techniques for studying DNA
show that some human populations were geographically separated for long
enough that they plausibly could have evolved average genetic
differences in cognition and behavior.
But in his recent book,
“Who We Are and How We Got Here,’’ he explicitly repudiates Dr. Watson’s
presumption that such differences would “correspond to longstanding
popular stereotypes’’ as “essentially guaranteed to be wrong.’’
Even Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist who argues that
nature decisively trumps nurture when it comes to individuals, rejects
speculation about average racial differences.
“There are powerful
methods for studying the genetic and environmental origins of
individual differences, but not for studying the causes of average
differences between groups,” Dr. Plomin writes in an afterword to be
published this spring in the paperback edition of his book, “Blueprint:
How DNA Makes Us Who We Are.”
Whether Dr. Watson was aware of any
of this science is unclear. In the film, he appears to have grown
increasingly isolated. He mentions missing Francis Crick, his
collaborator in the race to decipher the structure of DNA.
“We liked each other,’’ Dr. Watson says of Dr. Crick. “I couldn’t get enough of him.’’
As history now knows, the duo was able to solve the puzzle in 1953,
with their hallmark models of cardboard and metal only with the help of
another scientist, Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photograph of the DNA
molecule was shown to Dr. Watson without her permission.
The
tools of molecular biology unlocked by their discovery have since been
used to trace humanity’s prehistory, devise lifesaving therapies, and
develop Crispr, a gene-editing technology that was used recently, and
unethically, to alter the DNA of twin human embryos.
And Dr.
Watson became perhaps the most influential biologist of the second half
of the 20th century. His textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,’’
helped define the new field. First in a laboratory at Harvard and then
at Cold Spring Harbor, he trained a new generation of molecular
biologists and used his star power to champion such projects as the
first sequencing of the human genome.
“You knew when you heard
him that you were at the start of a revolution in understanding,’’ Nancy
Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
studied with Dr. Watson in the 1960s, says in “Decoding Watson.’’
“You felt as if you were part of this tiny group of people who had seen the light.’’
Mr. Mannucci, the director and producer, was drawn to his subject by a
certain similarity to “the King Lear story’,’ he said — “that this man
was at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws,
was brought down.” The film highlights Dr. Watson’s penchant for
provocation, exemplified by his candid 1968 memoir, “The Double Helix,”
of the race to decipher DNA’s structure.
In later years, even
before his 2007 comments, Dr. Watson began making offensive statements
about groups of people, suggesting, among other things, that exposure to
sunlight in equatorial regions increases sexual urges and that fat
people are less ambitious than others.
“He was a semiprofessional
loose cannon,’’ said Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at Johns
Hopkins University. “We become prisoners of our own personas.” In the
film, Dr. Comfort also suggests that Dr. Watson’s views on race are the
result of the genetic filter he applies to the world: “There’s a risk to
thinking about genes all the time.”
But Mary-Claire King, a
leading geneticist at the University of Washington who knows Dr. Watson
well and is not in the film, suggested that the racially homogeneous
culture of science also played a role in shaping Dr. Watson’s
misconceptions.
“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.
If that is the case, it may not bode well for combating prejudice in
biomedical research, where African-Americans represent just 1.5 percent
of grant applications to the N.I.H. Biases in hiring by medical school
science departments are well documented.
“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m
not Watson,’’’ said Kenneth Gibbs, a researcher at the N.I.H. who
studies racial disparities in science. “But one should really be asking
himself or herself, ‘What am I doing to ensure our campus environments
are supporting scientists from backgrounds that are not there?’’’
“Decoding Watson’’ marks the first time Dr. Watson and his wife, Liz,
have spoken publicly at length about finding out that Rufus, their older
son, has schizophrenia. Rufus and his brother, Duncan, also appear in
the film, but Mr. Mannucci said that other people close to Dr. Watson
declined to participate.
In interviews with The Times, some said
they believed that Dr. Watson was ill served by speaking publicly at
this point in his life.
Still, Mr. Mannucci said that he had
asked Dr. Watson about race and intelligence several times over the
course of making the film in order to ascertain his real views. “I
didn’t want to feel that it was a product of age or having caught him in
a moment, trying to get a rise out of someone,’’ he said.
In the
film, Dr. Watson sometimes seems to be grasping for explanations for
his own views on race and intelligence. He mentions that he is a
“product of the Roosevelt era,’’ and that he has always believed genes
are important.
“To the extent that I’ve hurt people,’’ he said, “of course I regret it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Amy Harmon is a national correspondent, covering the intersection of
science and society. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for her series
“The DNA Age”, and as part of a team for the series “How Race Is Lived
in America.”
@amy_harmon • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 31, 2018, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: For James Watson, the Price Was Exile. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
