James Watson has died

James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
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More famous headlines:

Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1]
Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2]
Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3]
Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...

[2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f...

[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/dick-cheney-dies

[4] https://uproxx.com/indie/ozzy-osbourne-dead-76/

muskyFelon• 9 months ago

Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful.

observationist• 9 months ago

It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.)

"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"

It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.

carabiner• 9 months ago

This is normal english.

golem14• 9 months ago

  Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
  Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
  Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
  Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
  Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
  Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen   with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.


  -- Michael Palin

runnr_az• 9 months ago

97 years old... must've had good genes...

ProllyInfamous• 9 months ago

Oh eu...

Seriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity.

sharadov• 9 months ago

Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?

shevy-java• 9 months ago

I am not sure. What I do know is that they used to go to pubs, so they probably used to drink pints.

robotresearcher• 9 months ago

Specifically The Eagle in Cambridge. Close to Kings College, and a cosy and storied pub it is. The back bar has photos and soot-signatures of air crews from all over the world, a tradition that started during WWII.

jacksnipe• 9 months ago

You mean plagiarized it?

echelon4• 9 months ago

Franklin and her grad student produced key experimental data that corrected and confirmed the model that Watson and Crick were already hard at work on.

Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.

Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.

Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.

pfannkuchen2• 9 months ago

Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t completely unheard of in science, at least historically if not today. Would they not have done the same if it were a more junior man? Like sure if he walked up to them and literally gave them the idea, they may not have (in either case), but with the circumstances as I understand them to be, I think this kind of thing happens all the time?

echelon4• 9 months ago

You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis

dekhn• 9 months ago

No, Mullis wrote the Nature paper on time reversal due to the LSD trip (https://www.nature.com/articles/218663b0)

vondur• 9 months ago

He gave a talk at where I worked and did make reference to an LSD trip in reference to the PCR process.

bossyTeacher3• 9 months ago

High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings

inglor_cz• 9 months ago

"We definitely need a debate on men..."

What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.

In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.

JKCalhoun• 9 months ago

Maybe thinking of August Kekulé and the carbon ring [1]? I have read elsewhere it was a "pipe dream".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé#Kekulé's_dream

aidenn0• 9 months ago

https://maps.org/2004/08/08/nobel-prize-genius-crick-was-hig...

But also

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6835/was-franci...

culi2• 9 months ago

There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA.

The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom.

Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings.

I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph?

jhbadger2• 9 months ago

It's important to realize that "Photograph 51" wasn't "Franklin's" -- it was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student mentored by Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What happened was that Wilkins chose to share the data with Watson and Crick. Yes, he maybe should have consulted with Franklin first (and certainly with Gosling, whose opinion nobody seems to care about).

In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit

sriram_malhar2• 9 months ago

No, they didn't do a "quick analysis". They were in a race with Linus Pauling to figure out the structure. Pauling's son happened to leak the fact that Linus Pauling's lab had a triple helix, so they asked the son casually for notes. That, along with Gosling & Franklin's XRays convinced them that their own original model (and Pauling's) were flawed.

Aurornis2• 9 months ago

Last time I checked, this was basically folklore. There were some allusions to Francis Crick experimenting with LSD, but their DNA work predates that.

Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him.

bhickey2• 9 months ago

You might be thinking of Kary Mullis, who supposedly came up with PCR while riding his motorcycle on LSD.

hooskerdu• 9 months ago

I thought he was driving in his car up a mountain with his wife/girlfriend asleep in the passenger seat.

I need to re-read his book

acjohnson552• 9 months ago

Riding a motorcycle on LSD is nuts

LarsDu884• 9 months ago

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption.

The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.

Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?

Aurornis2• 9 months ago

Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong.

Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.

moralestapia2• 9 months ago

an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery

I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.

JuniperMesos2• 9 months ago

Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs.

Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.

vixen99• 9 months ago

Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.

aerostable_slug2• 9 months ago

racist things about Irish people

It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.

See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.

LarsDu884• 9 months ago

It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English)

How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?

griffzhowl2• 9 months ago

primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits

I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.

LarsDu884• 8 months ago

This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem.

Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.

rufus_foreman• 9 months ago

> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people

Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?

jaaustin• 9 months ago

I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement.

[1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...

the__alchemist• 9 months ago

This book slaps. Constructed from interviews the author had with the great biologists and chemists of the era.

aoasadflkjafl3• 9 months ago

I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his real brilliance was clinging to him. It's probably worth mentioning that being a 30 something doing a PhD seems to be a big advantage, though, especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.

Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.

greazy• 9 months ago

Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine

Someone publicly known?

stogot• 9 months ago

especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research.

Who are you referring to in this?

woleium• 9 months ago

it is also of note that Watson repeatedly made public statements, starting in 2007, asserting that he believed Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, attributing this to genetics, a claim broadly denounced by scientists and the public as racist and scientifically invalid.

minnowguy• 9 months ago

Amazing book. Tied with _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ as my favorite non-fiction book.

sho_hn• 9 months ago

Damn.

I love Making, and I'm currently on a Nick Lane/biology bender. Eigth Day is new to me. On my way to the e-book store of my persuasion ...

cyode• 9 months ago

That's a pretty epic title. And the cover art reminds me fondly of those textbooks from my past that were somehow extremely dry yet captivating at the same time.

Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History

ChrisMarshallNY• 9 months ago

He was an “interesting” chap.

He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps.

Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice.

Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser.

It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made.

xtiansimon2• 9 months ago

“…this opportunity to shill…”

Oh? Care to reveal your stake in the success of the book?

xtiansimon2• 9 months ago

Whatever, you said “shill”, which means you’re usually an inside man.

sega_sai• 9 months ago

He clearly was an exceptional scientist, but also likely an a*hole. Also unfortunately when people get older, many people's negative qualities are amplified. That seem to have happened with Watson and has tarnished his legacy.

kulahan4• 9 months ago

Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes.

edmundsauto• 9 months ago

I care. His legacy is tarnished by being a bad human being, when it is pretty easy to be a decent person. It’s worth recognizing the accomplishment without lauding the person.

Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson.

Teever2• 9 months ago

Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes.

We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.

dyauspitr2• 9 months ago

A lot of people care. Love his work, hate the person, feel obligated to rightfully demonize him, not his work.

speed_spread• 9 months ago

Those great things were accomplished _despite_ them being assholes and often would have been accomplished by the next person in line anyway who would have just happened not to make an ego trip out of it.

InfiniteRand• 9 months ago

I think if he had died at 50 his reputation would be much much better, although he is certainly not unique in that regard

khazhoux2• 9 months ago

Just found this app: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dileorob/content/apps/photo51.php

I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat!

sidcool• 9 months ago

RIP you legend.

BrandoElFollito5• 9 months ago

It is sad, however, that he stole the research of Franklin and by today standards should be stripped from his honors.

And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed.

A terrible person indeed.

jadamson5• 9 months ago

He didn't steal anything. Franklin's PhD student took the famous Photo 51, Franklin was credited in the paper [1], and there's much more besides [2]:

"We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London."

[1] https://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Wa...

[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rosalind-franklin-dna-st...

BrandoElFollito5• 9 months ago

Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale) and then went on discussing what she wears.

I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life.

She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously.

Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world.

JuniperMesos2• 9 months ago

By today's standards, if I heard that some random ordinary scientist was stripped of their honors and was being widely labeled a terrible person in internet comment threads, I would seriously consider the possibility that they were the real victim in the situation.

BrandoElFollito5• 9 months ago

Have you ever heard anything he said about women, gays, blacks, etc? He is the kind of guy I would not even approach, while so many people were bowing.

This is in addition to his stolen work of course.

The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name.

mykowebhn• 9 months ago

One hundred percent agree with you. This is a perfect example where what's remembered as history is largely influenced by what was told by the victor.

peterfirefly4• 8 months ago

Looks like Franklin won, then.

morgengold2• 9 months ago

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

nikanj• 9 months ago

Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results

focusgroup0• 9 months ago

There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff"

SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success:

https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...

graemep2• 9 months ago

Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically.

He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.

It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.

EnPissant7• 9 months ago

Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races.

That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.

schemester• 8 months ago

Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up.

patall• 9 months ago

He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence.

Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.

morgengold2• 9 months ago

thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence.

For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."

Would you say this is a valid belief?

cwmma3• 9 months ago

That's like saying:

"Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you."

When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.

somenameforme3• 9 months ago

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control.

However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity.

Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

ghtbircshotbe• 9 months ago

Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.

regularization• 9 months ago

The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison).

It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.

Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.

typicalset• 9 months ago

An intervention on the household someone is raised in is not the same as an intervention on race. This is part of what it means when people say racism is a structural problem: people are, systematically, treated differently in many different parts of their lives. The USA is a country where, within living memory, the insurrection act was invoked to allow black children to attend a school which wanted to segregate them.

Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/ [2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.... [3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228

tptacek7• 9 months ago

The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls.

The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."

arp242• 9 months ago

Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals.

Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland.

I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".

prmph5• 9 months ago

This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have.

I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.

more_corn• 9 months ago

Didn’t he steal the discovery from the woman who actually took the photo?

peterfirefly4• 8 months ago

No, but feminists and white knights maintain that the photo that was actually taken by a man (Gosling) was taken by a woman (Franklin) and that she (Franklin) hadn't given permission for them to steal the photo. They didn't steal it, they saw it briefly and immediately knew what it meant (because they had been preparing hard and already knew most aspects of the structure of DNA) and they were allowed to see it (Wilkins who showed it to them had the right to do so). Neither Franklin nor Gosling understood what the photo meant.

Edit: wrote "Wilkinson" by msitake.

isodev• 9 months ago

James Watson, who helped discover Rosalind Franklin’s notes and notebooks, is dead at 97

mywrathacademia• 9 months ago

He will be remembered as a racist. He’ll be joining other racists.

James Watson has died

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