Watson's Dark Vision
By Marcy Darnovsky,
Philadelphia Inquirer
| 11. 05. 2007
James Watson has left his post as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in disgrace. He's apologized for questioning the intelligence of Africans, and issued a statement saying that there "is no scientific basis for such a belief."
Apparently unsatisfied with his double-helix fame, the man who long occupied the pinnacle of scientific achievement has made repeated headlines with egregiously offensive pronouncements. Over the last decade, Watson has said that sunlight and darker skin is the source of more powerful libidos; that abortion to eliminate a fetus predisposed to be gay would be fine; that fat people are less ambitious than thin people; that children he considers "stupid" should be genetically treated; that we should pay rich people to have more children; and that we should do what we can to prevent the birth of "ugly girls."
That's not all. Watson has pursued an aggressive agenda to mobilize genetic science in the service of a renewed eugenics. That's right: Watson wants to genetically re-engineer the human species.
At a high-profile 1998 UCLA conference, Watson joined other well-known scientists and nearly...
Related Articles
Public domain portrait of James D. Watson by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
and the National Human Genome Research Institute on Wikimedia Commons
James Watson, a scientist famous for ground-breaking work on DNA and notorious for expressing his antediluvian opinions, died on November 6, at the age of 97. Watson’s scientific eminence was primarily based on the 1953 discovery of the helical structure of DNA, for which he, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or...
By Shoumita Dasgupta, STAT | 10.03.2025
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
This approach is factually wrong: The broadening definition of autism and the improvement in diagnosis...
By Jay S. Kaufman, Los Angeles Review of Books | 09.27.2025
This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...