Lab revokes honors for controversial DNA scientist Watson
Source: Associated Press
Lab revokes honors for controversial DNA scientist Watson
By MALCOLM RITTER
January 11, 2019
NEW YORK (AP) — James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning DNA scientist who lost his job in 2007 for expressing racist views, was stripped of several honorary titles Friday by the New York lab he once headed.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said it was reacting to Watson’s remarks in a television documentary aired earlier this month.
In the film, Watson said his views about intelligence and race had not changed since 2007, when he told a magazine 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 — where all the testing says not really.”
In the 2007 interview, Watson said that while he hopes everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”
In this month’s documentary, he said genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/5b40e363ddc54d3c96f520fd52345917
= new reply since forum marked as read
so--who is surprised?
Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly Photo 51, while at King's College London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins, but, although there was not yet a rule against posthumous awards,[6] the Nobel Committee generally does not make posthumous nominations.[7][8]
