“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.
Well, this is tragic. James Watson – yes, the Watson & Crick Watson – is auctioning off his Nobel Prize because he’s short of cash. Ever since a public outing of some IQ-related racist comments, the laureate told the Financial Times that he’s now considered an “unperson.”
Watson, who earned the accolade in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, will auction off the Nobel prize this Thursday at Christie’s in New York. This is the first time a living person’s Nobel is up for grabs, and has a value of $3.5 million.
It sounds pretty terrible that such a lauded scientist has been ostracized to the point that he needs to hawk the award for his life’s work to drum up some cash. But the pariah status is deserved. An editorial in the Telegraph says:
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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.
The piece is authored by scientist-cum-journo Adam Rutherford, who outlines the scientific contribution of Watson & Crick’s discovery – and the bigotry, unrelated, that came in hand. He concludes:
