racist sexist James Watson has died

Nobel prize winning scientist that Charlie Kirk would have loved....


James Watson: From DNA pioneer to untouchable pariah | STAT https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
He co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism


Together, they shed light on the puzzle of Watson’s later years: a public and unrepentant racism and sexism that made him a pariah in life and poisoned his legacy in death.

Watson cared deeply about history’s verdict, which left old friends even more baffled about his statements and behavior. It started in 2007, when Watson told a British newspaper that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” Moreover, he continued, although one might wish that all humans had an equal genetic endowment of intelligence, “people who have to deal with Black employees find this not true.”


Lab strips James Watson of final honorary roles after his continuing racist statements
He had not been misquoted. He had not misspoken. He had made the same claim in his 2007 memoir, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science”: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically,” Watson wrote. “Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.” As for women, he wrote: “Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with the clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated.”

There was more like that, and worse, in private conversations, friends said. Watson became an untouchable, with museums, universities, and others canceling speaking invitations and CSHL giving him the boot. (Though as memories of his worst remarks receded, Watson enjoyed sporadic rehabilitation.) Friends were left shaking their heads.

“I really don’t know what happened to Jim,” said biologist Nancy Hopkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in the 1990s led the campaign to get MIT to recognize its discrimination against women faculty. “At a time when almost no men supported women, he insisted I get a Ph.D. and made it possible for me to do so,” she told STAT in 2018. But after 40 years of friendship, Watson turned on her after she blasted the claim by then-Harvard University president Lawrence Summers in 2005 that innate, biological factors kept women from reaching the pinnacle of science.