Watson and Crack
We assume Nobel Prize winner James Watson is smoking something, because he's evidently nuts.
Watson and Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the molecular structure of DNA. These days he's made an encore career of saying wildly inappropriate things.
His recent, completely racist comments about Africa ("He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.'") are only the latest.
He's also said women should be allowed to abort gay fetuses and that eugenics is cool as long as we engineer a world full of beautiful ladies.
They say there's a fine line between genius and insanity but in Watson's case there seems to be no line at all. (Actually, the genius part is up for debate. Lots of people think he stole the DNA discovery from Rosalind Franklin. So he might just be crazy.)
UPDATE: We just want to acknowledge that Watson apologized "unreservedly" and retired from Cold Spring Harbor Labs, writing "Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue."
Posted on October 18, 2007 by - andrewprice
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Watson and Crack
Watson may have gone over the line from genius to whacko, and if so, he joins a long line of geniuses in many fields.
However, his genius is not up for debate as the author claims, at least not among most people who understand his scientific contributions.
Rosalind Franklin deserved more acknowledgment than Watson and Crick gave her for her X-ray defraction work that was important to their discovery, but if there are lots of people who think Watson stole the DNA discovery from her, those "lots of people" are people who don't understand the discovery path of DNA. Perhaps they have read polemic books written by other people who similarly don't understand the path.
Watson may have become disgusting. The same can be said of Michael Jackson and Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Jackson was a genius at performing and Wittgenstein was a genius at philosophy. You can attack them and Watson for what makes them disgusting without gratuitously and inaccurately denigrating the evidence of their genius.
Posted on October 21, 2007 — by GoodpersonMaybe
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