The Nobel Prize-winning American scientist, James Watson, who co-discovered DNA has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating racist comments in a documentary, in which he said race and intelligence are connected.
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, said the 90-year-old scientist’s remarks were “unsubstantiated and reckless” so it was revoking all titles and honors from Watson, who led the lab for many years.
Dr Watson He shared the Nobel in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick for their 1953 discovery of the DNA’s double helix structure.
Dr Watson had made similar claims in 2007 and subsequently apologised. He sold his gold medal in 2014, saying he had been ostracised by the scientific community after his remarks about race.
In 2007 when he worked at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, told 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”.
He also said that while he wished the races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Watson apologized at the time but in a recent documentary he said his views have not changed.
“Not at all,” he said in the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson. The latest comments “effectively reverse the written apology and retraction Dr Watson made in 2007”, the lab said.
He said “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 IQ tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.”
The lab’s president, Bruce Stillman, and chair of the board of trustees Marilyn Simons said in a statement, “he made in the documentary are completely and utterly incompatible with our mission, values, and policies. The laboratory condemns the misuse of science to justify prejudice.”
>Juthy Saha
DNA Pioneer James Watson Loses Honors over Racist Comments
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