Adam Rutherford doesn’t have much sympathy for James Watson’s complaints of undue neglect.
The great scientist James Watson is to auction his Nobel prize medal. He told the Financial Times this week that following accusations of racism in 2007, “no one really wants to admit I exist”, and as a result his income had plummeted and he has become an “unperson”.
If his income plummeted as a result of people avoiding him, that can mean only that he no longer gets big fees for speaking or lecturing. Well…yes, and?
If people no longer want to pay to hear him talk, then they don’t. If that’s because he revealed himself to be a racist, then well done people who no longer want to hear him talk. He’s not simply automatically entitled to big speaking fees.
This sounds awful: an 86-year-old hero ostracised for his views, shooed from public life by the people who walk in his scientific shadow.
But it’s not awful. Watson has said that he is “not a racist in a conventional way”. But he told the Sunday Times in 2007 that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. Call me old-fashioned, but that sounds like bog-standard, run-of-the-mill racism to me.
And this current whinge bemoans a new poverty born of his pariah status. Apart “from my academic income”, he says, Watson is condemned to a miserly wage that prevents him from buying a David Hockney painting.
In short, he’s no longer popular, because of his bog-standard racism. Well there you go.
With Nobels, we put people on pedestals and gift them platforms to say whatever they like. Here, they represent science, but contrary to stereotype, there isn’t a typical scientist. We’re just people.
Some Nobel laureates say stupid ignorant things. Most say little beyond their expertise, and some, such as the president of the Royal Society, Paul Nurse, are great leaders and campaigners for science and society.
And the same applies to non-laureate scientists. A famous scientist can be both a great campaigner for science and a racist or sexist or both. This is a thing that can happen.
“No one really wants to admit I exist” says Watson. That’s not it. It’s more that no one is interested in his racist, sexist views. Watson, alongside Crick, will always be the discoverer of the double helix, to my mind the scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. Here’s our challenge: celebrate science when it is great, and scientists when they deserve it. And when they turn out to be awful bigots, let’s be honest about that too. It turns out that just like DNA, people are messy, complex and sometimes full of hideous errors.
And we can always look at David Hockney paintings in books or museums.
“Watson, alongside Crick, will always be the discoverer of the double helix”
How much if any credit should Rosalind Franklin get for helping with the discovery? Also, how exactly did Watson and Crick come to use her picture of it? I’m not insinuating they must have stolen it, I’ve heard multiple versions and I’m not really sure which is the truth, if you could help me on this point?
I admire him as a scientists, but deplore him as a man. His discovery was a watershed that has led, and which will continue to lead, to all sorts of therapies/medicines/treatments etc that could save countless lives.
I respected Watson as a scientist. I do not respect his racism.
Maybe he should have just quietly retired without all of the drama.
Rosalind Franklin was scheduled to receive the Nobel Prize, but she died and it can’t be awarded posthumously. So it’s up to people who realize her vital contribution to the double helix discovery to mention that. And her. While we must avoid “lone genius”-type thinking, many have noted that it was one particular image Franklin had made that caused Watson and Crick to realize the correct molecular structure. However, I understand there was rather a race to the patent office, and W&C got there just 20 minutes before “the other guys” – I wonder if they, too, used Franklin’s images.
I love the review of James Watson’s book, “The Double Helix”, I think that’s the one, where one wag summarized the contents thusly: “Hi, I’m Jim. I’m smart. That’s Francis. He’s smart, too. The rest are bloody clots.” Haven’t read the book myself O_O
Famous people often seem to get to a point where they figure they’re so famous that it now doesn’t matter what they say and they are free to express themselves freely, without the possibility of any negative consequences. In Hollywood, we saw this when Mel Gibson went on various antiSemitic rants, when Tom Cruise couch-jumped and said that psychoactive medications are bad, and I’m sure you lot can think up a lot more! It’s that sharp intake of breath moment – “He didn’t just say THAT, did he???” I can’t think of any female examples, but they no doubt exist – hubris can affect anyone.
And then there’s the plaintive “Why???” from the indiscrete famous person when the predictable negative outcomes come rolling in. And then he might claim it was just a joke. Taken out of context. Or click bait. Or something O_O
Paula Deen – there’s a woman whose big racist mouth got HER into career hot water as well.
that while people may like to think that all races are born with equal intelligence, those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”
Offtopic
I wonder why we don’t get many defenders(from the non believer community) of the truth is the truth and so cannot be racist when it comes to Watson’s views ?
If only Watson had used women instead of races , he would get a lot of approving tweets and speaking gigs.
Ok, here’s the deal according to Wikipedia (in their Rosalind Franklin article, which has sources):
Rosalind Franklin’s images of X-ray diffraction, confirming the helical structure of DNA, were shown to Watson without her approval or knowledge. This image provided valuable insight into the DNA structure, but Franklin’s scientific contributions to the discovery of the double helix are often overlooked.
Unpublished drafts of her papers (written just as she was arranging to leave King’s College, London) show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. Moreover, it was a report of Franklin’s that convinced Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, which was crucial since before this both they and Linus Pauling had independently generated non-illuminating models with the chains inside and the bases pointing outwards. However, her work was published third, in the series of three DNA Nature articles, led by the paper of Watson and Crick which only hinted at her contribution to their hypothesis. Watson has suggested that Franklin could have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Maurice Wilkins.
We do. Seriously, we so much do. I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a Watson post on Pharyngula and not spent a good couple of hours yelling at some low-IQ* race realist who wants to talk about how important IQ is and we really, really, really, need to have a conversation about which races are smarter than others, because the history of physical anthropology apparently doesn’t exist.
*I’m not even fucking kidding. One guy, in an attempt to appear more ‘objective’, defended Watson’s comments about Africans by mentioning how his own IQ was nothing special. Of course, his being a complete dolt didn’t prevent him from participating in the conversation as a sapient member of the species, even though the point of Watson’s he was defending was exactly that.
Apparently, anecdotal reports by employers about Black employees are now admissible as scientific findings?
We do. Seriously, we so much do. ,/i>
I’ll take your word for it :(. But I guess I was thinking of someone like Sam Harris rather than trolls.
Those comments by Watson came out a few days before he was due to give a talk at the university I worked at. I had my ticket and everything. I’d persuaded about half a dozen people to come along. Then he said what he said and the university cancelled the talk.
A few months later, Dawkins gave a talk at the same venue. I got my ticket and persuaded about half a dozen people to come along…. I don’t have a great track record with these things, do I?
Oh that’s so sad.
People do keep saying that…
Blanche, Rosalind Franklin was never scheduled for the Nobel. We have no way of knowing what would have happened if she had lived long enough, but I suspect she would have missed out regardless. Franklin died in 1958 and the Nobel committee first considered the prize for the structure of DNA in 1961/62, when the evidence had become overwhelmingly in favour of the Crick-Watson model. So she never had a chance. When Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel, they insisted on sharing it with Maurice Wilkins, the crystallographer who had worked with Franklin to create the images that led them to puzzle out the DNA helix. This is quite common — a lot of Nobel winners have insisted on sharing with colleagues — but the problem is that the Nobel committee will only consider three people for any given prize. (I’m not sure if that was enshrined in the rules in 1962, but it certainly is now, and historically no prize was awarded to more than three people anyway). Given this 3-person limit, and knowing how the Cambridge group treated Franklin, I would not be at all surprised in an alternative long-lived-Franklin universe if Crick and Watson had opted to share their Nobel with Wilkins but not Franklin.
(Note: none of this is about whether Franklin deserved to share in the Nobel, which I think most of today’s scientists would say that she definitely deserved it — Crick and Watson didn’t just look at her crystallography images, they had read her calculations.)
Nobel Prize
Kary Mullis
Its all a lot more complicated and cloak and dagger. Crick and Watson were worried that Linus Pauling would get the structure first. Franklin had the data they needed which explains but does not excuse their action in stealing it. In another universe Franklin might have received the Nobel with Pauling making the discovery.
And then there is the bizarre fact that Franklin had been told she had the X-Ray work all to herself at Kings while Wilkins was also working on it and had never agreed to stop.
It wasn’t just Crick and Watson who were assholes in that field in the day.
But the main reason she didn’t get the prize was her early death at 37 and the bar on posthumous awards.