08/11/2025
The genetic pioneer Dr James Watson has died at the age of 97, reports the New York Times and the BBC News Channel this weekend. Dr Watson shared in a Nobel Prize in the 1960s for his work on unravelling the double helix structure of DNA, the building block of all life that we know of.
On the other hand, Dr Watson was not without controversy. Throughout his career, he suggested that white people were genetically superior to other races, and in particular that black people's intelligence was genetically limited. An acerbic man and once described by a colleague - the biologist EO Wilson as the ""the most unpleasant human being I had ever met". Defenders of Dr Watson said that whilst his views were abhorrent, he had been so far removed from latest genetic research that his beliefs had gone unchallenged. In 1997, Dr Watson was quoted by an anti-gay newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph as saying that a woman had the right to choose to abort any foetus that was homosexual, should such a genetic test ever become viable. His remarks offended many LGBTQIA people as well as other scientists. Professor Richard Dawkins intervened and said that Watson would equally defend the right of a gay couple to elect to abort a heterosexual foetus and Watson himself wrote to the Telegraph taking issue with the way he had been portrayed. "You misquoted me. I am not hostile to the existence of homosexuals" he said. Nevertheless, partly because of Mr Watson's publicly held views, many British people still have concerns about the ramifications of genetic engineering, especially when applied to the human population.
