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.
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.
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]
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?
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,
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.
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.
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
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
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.
> In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
It’s fair to say Watson should have given more credit to the work of Franklin and Gosling, but to claim it’s “cheating, pure and simple” is clearly revisionist history.
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?
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.
This is not an honest depiction of the full picture.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
They did collaborate with each other. The labs at King’s and Cambridge shared information at different times. Franklin invited Watson to her lecture. She and Wilkins went to see the double helix model when it was completed. You’re treating a sensationalized version of the story as fact.
> All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
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?
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.
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.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
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.
It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
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.
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
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.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
She was credited, see the original W&C paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 at the end is an acknowledgement. She also has a related article in the same issue of Nature.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
Edit, in re-reading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 I see that she did suspect the DNA structure contained multiple chains. So my statement about about the double helix aspect was incomplete/incorrect.
This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work
Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures
Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.
Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
The work belonged to the lab (according to its director), and Franklin was in the process of moving to a different institution. Additionally, the labs at King’s and Cambridge had regularly been sharing information back and forth. Wilkins showing lab property to the Cambridge team was not unusual or because he looked down on Franklin.
The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
That’s actually a correct belief. That’s what the testing says.
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you?
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has"
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
> To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
Well timonoko also posts Grok generated FORTH code that doesn't work, and then retroactively claims it was just a joke when called on it, so it's safe to assume he doesn't know what he's talking about, that he and Grok and grokipedia are always joking and making shit up, and not to take any of them seriously, because he believes what he wants to believe without fact checking, and he post Grok generated AI slop regularly.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
In a clean game-theoretic terms, without making any moral or ideological claims about “who is smarter”, we’ll treat underlying advantage as any positional asset (intelligence, wealth, charisma, skill, social capital, etc.). The question is: If a subset of players has an advantage in a repeated, large-group game, how do they best play to maximize payoff and stability?
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent.
This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
Watson was the one who described Franklin as "belligerent, emotional, and unable to interpret her own data" in his book. He also repeatedly referred to her as "Rosy", a name Franklin never used.
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
One professor that I had said that she met him when he was a bit younger (when he was in his 60s), and every time he would walk into a room, he would immediately pick out the most attractive young women, and ask them to sit directly next to him.
No, they rushed to beat Pauling. In a just world Franklin would gotten a co-author credit, but I don't think anyone holds that she was going to have the breakthrough on her own.
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.
Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.
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.
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.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal relationship?
More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not.
Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives?
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
may I ask which of the following situations is preferrable: an asshole who saves your life, or a non asshole who lets you die because its the right thing to do?
I have no dog in this particular fight, but it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't endanger yourself to save someone else. It usually just creates two victims without professional support/equipment.
By the time you start advocating for "collective action", you should have defined what the goal of the action is a lot more precisely than "dissuade assholes from being assholes" because a social movement with an ambiguous goal is a menace to society: there is a reason no one want another witch hunt.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.
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...
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.
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
Amazing book. Tied with _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ as my favorite non-fiction book.
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 ...
This book slaps. Constructed from interviews the author had with the great biologists and chemists of the era.
Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
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?
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
yeah, generally the grad students are the ones performing experiments and the mentors are writing grants and helping to interpret data
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.
You might be thinking of Kary Mullis, who supposedly came up with PCR while riding his motorcycle on LSD.
Riding a motorcycle on LSD is nuts
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https://maps.org/2004/08/08/nobel-prize-genius-crick-was-hig...
But also
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6835/was-franci...
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
I am not sure. What I do know is that they used to go to pubs, so they probably used to drink pints.
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.
You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
No, Mullis wrote the Nature paper on time reversal due to the LSD trip (https://www.nature.com/articles/218663b0)
From the Wikipedia page
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
He gave a talk at where I worked and did make reference to an LSD trip in reference to the PCR process.
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
"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.
> In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
It’s fair to say Watson should have given more credit to the work of Franklin and Gosling, but to claim it’s “cheating, pure and simple” is clearly revisionist history.
You mean plagiarized it?
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?
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.
This is not an honest depiction of the full picture.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model.
All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating...
> she didn't realize its significance or implication.
That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her
They did collaborate with each other. The labs at King’s and Cambridge shared information at different times. Franklin invited Watson to her lecture. She and Wilkins went to see the double helix model when it was completed. You’re treating a sensationalized version of the story as fact.
> All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
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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!
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?
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.
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.
>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.
Arguably it is worse.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
>Einstein
>diminished contributions in later part of his life
Whew, that's a wild one.
What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen?
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
> is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing.
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
[1] still got downvoted smh
> 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.
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"?
It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England.
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https://archive.today/KaTaT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson
What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful.
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.
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.
This is normal english.
This is native English and quite colloquial. It's been used in widespread use in newspapers and in the media since forever.
From just recently:
> James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
> ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’
> Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73
> Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
> Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74
> Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101
> Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70
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/
Plenty of non-paywall links that would be better here eg
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8xdypnz32o
97 years old... must've had good genes...
Oh eu...
Seriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
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That's reframing things too much.
There's the experimental data, and then there's the theoretical model.
Watson and Crick were already working on a theoretical double helix model prior to discovering Franklin's x-ray crystallography data, but at the time their model was wrong.
Franklin produced the x-ray crystallographic data that completed the picture and produced the correct working model. Franklin could have also figured out the double helix model herself using her own data and extensive crystallography background, but Watson and Crick were laser focused on only this one problem and beat her to it.
Franklin was robbed of the recognition she deserved, and Watson and Crick should have co-credited her at minimum. But it's incorrect to say that Watson and Crick weren't about to figure it out themselves.
Franklin tragically died of cancer a few years after the discovery and was ineligible to receive a posthumous Nobel Prize. She was only 37.
She was credited, see the original W&C paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/171737a0 at the end is an acknowledgement. She also has a related article in the same issue of Nature.
I wouldn't be so sure that Franklin would have figured out that DNA was an antiparallel double helix. She knew it was a helix from the fibre diffraction pattern, but I don't think just anybody would have had the insight W&C did about it being a double helix and antiparallel, which immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. However, we can't know for sure.
Edit, in re-reading https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 I see that she did suspect the DNA structure contained multiple chains. So my statement about about the double helix aspect was incomplete/incorrect.
This is not an honest depiction. Watson and Crick didn't just use her stolen work to "confirm" what they were working on. It was the entire basis of the rest of their work
Wilkins was her colleague but considered her an "assistant". That's why he felt entitled to take Franklin's Photograph 51 without telling her. It took Franklin another year or so complete the analysis of Photograph 51 and map the position of every atom. Watson and Crick used Photograph 51 (again, without Franklin's knowledge or consent) and did a quick analysis of the data that they used to build a few potential structures
Yes, it's possible Watson and Crick would've eventually arrived at the right answer but we really have no idea how far off they were. Franklin's work didn't just "support" their work. It was the very basis of it after that point.
Franklin's work on the structure of viruses also led directly to ANOTHER nobel prize of a colleague in 1982 (Aaron Klug). It's hard to understate how tremendous the impact of her work has been.
The work belonged to the lab (according to its director), and Franklin was in the process of moving to a different institution. Additionally, the labs at King’s and Cambridge had regularly been sharing information back and forth. Wilkins showing lab property to the Cambridge team was not unusual or because he looked down on Franklin.
>Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
this is a preposterously reductive and dishonest account of what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
Yes, how she was treated by Crick and Watson was scandalous.
That's what I read on the surface. Any useful links for the context?
The best I've read is "The Eighth Day Of Creation" (which is amazing book beyond the part that covers the elucidation of the structure of DNA). He references multiple internal data sources that establish the process by which Gosling's photo made it to Watson and Crick. Of all the accounts I've read, it seems to be the most factual. I think it's also worth reading Watson's account ("The Double Helix") and the book that originally brought the most attention to the treatment of Franklin ("Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA")
I believe this article has some updated results: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/rosalind-franklin... and it appears there was an earlier book before Dark Lady, referenced here: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/21/archives/rosalind-frankli...
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This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
That's a quote from the NYT obituary.
It's also incomplete and incorrect. It was Gosling's photo, he did the work for Franklin. And she had already shared the results in a department seminar before Wilkins showed it to W&C. And she was credited for this in the W&C paper in Nature.
Your own editorialized summary is the problem:
> Codiscoverer of Rosalind Franklin's notebooks.
Watson and Crick were already working on a double helix model. The crystallographic data helped them fit the puzzle pieces and confirm the model. You're discounting all of the work they put into it.
Having a diffraction picture of DNA helps, but you still have to put all of the residues in the correct places, understand the 5' to 3' alignment, work out how replication might work...
This is what the diffraction pattern gets you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51#/media/File:60251254_...
Now solve for the atoms and bonds.
You're making them out to be thieves.
If you were working on a theoretical model of an unknown molecule using primitive tools and somebody had data that could confirm your ideas and fix the kinks, wouldn't you want to see it so you could finish your work?
Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins were all talking to one another about their work. Franklin had dismissed Watson and Crick's previous molecular model as it was incorrect at the time. Franklin wasn't working on a molecular model of her own.
Watson and Crick were able to synthesize information from several labs and experimental sources, including Franklin's experimental data, and apply it to the problem they were directly working on in order to deduce the correct model.
Right place, right time, right problem, right context.
That Franklin died before she could win a Nobel Prize is tragic, but she wasn't the lone discoverer of DNA's structure.
What comments did he make and what type of fact-based concerns do you have with them?
if you read the article:
"he ignited an uproar by suggesting, in an interview with The Sunday Times in London, that Black people, over all, were not as intelligent as white people. He repeated the assertion in on-camera interviews for a PBS documentary about him, part of the “American Masters” series."
Taboos are very culture-specific. I suspect that the above statement would cause approximately zero uproar in China, or the Arabic world.
And that means that black people are inherently less intelligent?
That’s actually a correct belief. That’s what the testing says.
Note that I’m not saying the cause, merely that’s simply what the testing indicates and is a statement with a pure basis in fact.
There are different group averages in intelligence measurement and people have many feelings about why that is, but nobody credible disputes the mere existence of those data.
Anyways, that’s not in quotes so doesn’t answer the question.
First of all, what tests?
Second, you’d need to prove it’s genetic and not due to socio-economic factors.
I’m assuming you’ve thought of this?
FWIW watson was incredibly racist against scots-irish americans, repeatedly calling them dumb in his lectures. that doesn't necessarily excuse his casual racism, but i would assume he meant to imply that people can overcome their genetic ingroups' statistical predilections
lmao that's an extremely charitable take that doesn't comport with other racist bullshit he said
have you actually been to a talk he's given or are you just aping what other people report?
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you?
I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/the-elementary-d...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4067985/
He was right. The research does show black people are genetically less intelligent than white people, and nobody has ever found it to be otherwise. There's really no reason at all to think all races might be equal in intelligence. That's pure political bias with no basis in science.
Why mention genetic diversity? Spell out your logical steps instead of just stating isolated facts and leaving others to guess what you're implying.
"Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has"
AFAIK Africa has small pockets of very high diversity, but most Africans belong to the Nigero-Kordofan family which isn't very diverse at all. The groups that contribute to high overall diversity of the continent (Pygmies, the San) are very small, numbering in tens of thousands or so.
Not according to the linked study. In fact it's almost the opposite.
> Studies of genetic variation in Africa suggest that even though high levels of mixed ancestry are observed in most African populations, the genetic variation observed in Africa is broadly correlated with geography, language classification ... and subsistence classifications.
> For example, genetic variation among Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking populations from both Central and East Africa ... reflect the geographic region from which they originated, and generally shows a complex pattern of admixture between these populations and the Niger-Kordofanian speakers who migrated into the region more recently. Consistent with linguistic evidence regarding the origin of Nilo-Saharan languages in the Chad/Sudan border, the highest proportion of Nilo-Saharan ancestry is observed among southern Sudanese populations.
> To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
This seems like a very, very odd statement. The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
The genetic pool of a single family of very, very bright people is even smaller still.
Next, we can discuss what percentage of intelligence is heritable. You’re going to be surprised.
Why?
If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics, then trying to say a group with vast genetic diversity is all inferior is racist. A widely diverse genetic population will have a wide and diverse intelligence. You couldn't reasonably tell what any given individual or group could achieve because there's so much diversity.
> The genetic pool of Ashkenazi Jews is fairly small and nobody believes they’re not particularly intelligent.
This is widely disputed [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence
> If you fundamentally believe intelligence is solely linked to genetics
Strawman argument. I never said that.
>This is widely disputed.
No, it isn’t. You can plot ashkenazi Jews on a pct chart and their cluster is much tighter than the SNP distance between Norwegians and Swedish people. That means they have less genetic diversity, which is what you’d expect from a cohesive ethnic group.
> No, it isn’t.
Yes it is. See the linked wikipedia article to see a bunch of references to the dispute.
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is grokipedia allowed ??
I'm well aware of Watson's views that got him cancelled.
I know that Grok is meant to be the "uncensored, unbiased" version of LLMs. But the training data still reflects human bias, and there is definitely some irony in using an LLM for "objectivity." I do wonder what HN thinks about this though. Whether you can prompt an LLM to reflect more balanced takes that humans could do in controversial topics (assuming the LLM is "rooted" without a biased system prompt.)
Well timonoko also posts Grok generated FORTH code that doesn't work, and then retroactively claims it was just a joke when called on it, so it's safe to assume he doesn't know what he's talking about, that he and Grok and grokipedia are always joking and making shit up, and not to take any of them seriously, because he believes what he wants to believe without fact checking, and he post Grok generated AI slop regularly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44179381
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=timonoko
timonoko:
What is this abomination?
"Fact-checked by Grok"
So... it's a rip-off of Wikipedia edited by an LLM that was specifically designed for misinformation by the world's richest troll?
Do I have that right? Cancer.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
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I'm not sure what your definition of "nice" is, but mine doesn't include saying most of what's here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watson#Comments_on_race
> In 2007, the scientist, who once worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told the Times newspaper that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
> While his hope was that everybody was equal, he added, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
Yeah, pretty racist
In 2013, I sat in on one of his talks at the Salk Institute. This guy was one of the most openly racist and sexist people I've ever seen. He spent 5 minutes shitting on the former NIH head for not funding him because she was a "Hot blooded Irish woman"
This is the sort of turn-of-century Mr. Burns type racism that I don't think most Americans even remember.
I always wonder with that kind of racist explanation, how the line of reasoning goes.
Suppose for the sake of argument, there's a place where everyone has 10 IQ points less, on average, than the West.
The Flynn effect is about 14 points over a few decades.
How do you square those things? Did the West not have a society a few decades ago? Is there some reason you can't have civilization with slightly dumber people? There was a time when kids were malnourished in the west, and possibly dumber as a result. Also, not everyone in society makes decisions. It tends to be very few people, and nobody thinks politicians are intelligent either.
I've never heard an explanation of intelligence that had any actual real-world impact on a scale that matters to society.
The explanation would have to have quite a lot of depth to it, as you have to come up with some sort of theory connecting how people do on a test to whatever you think makes a good society.
In a clean game-theoretic terms, without making any moral or ideological claims about “who is smarter”, we’ll treat underlying advantage as any positional asset (intelligence, wealth, charisma, skill, social capital, etc.). The question is: If a subset of players has an advantage in a repeated, large-group game, how do they best play to maximize payoff and stability?
Here's the strategy chatgpt came up with (amongst many other):
What Not to Say (Avoid These)
Don’t describe intelligence or talent as intrinsic, innate, or permanent. This triggers resentment and identity defense.
Don’t use language that signals “I am ahead of you.”
Don’t use your advantage to win every interaction—save leverage for important conflicts.
People tolerate talent. They hate being made aware of being lower in the hierarchy.
_____
Is it possible the backlash to Watson could be viewed from this game theocratic perspective, and not that he was racist and wrong?
Hmmm, let's see.
How many people died in wars in the 20th century? How many of them did NOT originate in Europe and Asia?
How much of climate change that has fouled up the earth we depend is NOT attributable to economic activity in the west?
Is there a western/Asian country where late-stage capitalism and the devaluation of of the common has not taken hold?
I could go on...
Are these evidence of intelligence? This is not a rhetorical question.
> whereas all the testing says not really
This part is (still) true. Is that fact racist?
on top of that, I personally know several women scientists that had to put up with his misogyny first-hand.
There was irony involved.
Watson was the one who described Franklin as "belligerent, emotional, and unable to interpret her own data" in his book. He also repeatedly referred to her as "Rosy", a name Franklin never used.
Wilkins was the one who showed Franklin's Photograph 51 to Watson. This was without Franklin's consent and before her photographs were officially published. Watson and Crick then rushed to publish their findings before Franklin could
One professor that I had said that she met him when he was a bit younger (when he was in his 60s), and every time he would walk into a room, he would immediately pick out the most attractive young women, and ask them to sit directly next to him.
No, they rushed to beat Pauling. In a just world Franklin would gotten a co-author credit, but I don't think anyone holds that she was going to have the breakthrough on her own.
It wasn't Franklin's photograph.
> Wow, good genes!
Said with irony? I mean, the guy was into eugenics—thought some races are smarter than others.
A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.
Even if he was "into eugenics", there is strong evidence that your genetic makeup contributes significantly to your longevity.
And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?
Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.
But isn't this true? Asians are proven to have the highest IQ
I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.
You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?
No.
Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.
There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."
If it was a cultural thing it would be a multi modal distribution.
It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.
People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.
Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.
We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Research...
This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.
>There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic.
There isn't even any concrete evidence that it's a good thing.
Intelligence has a significant genetic component, otherwise it couldn't have evolved.
"Intelligence isn't genetic" is the left's version of creationism.
No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."
The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.
For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.
I'm so tired.
If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.
As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.
I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.
By all means they should remain in textbooks. We have a lot of unredeemable people in history that we should not ignore.
If anything it's probably a healthy reminder that even "smart" people can have blinders on?
> the guy was into eugenics
So are you (probably). Do you think incest should be legalized?
> thought some races are smarter than others
What other conclusion can you reasonably come to based on the available data?
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?
EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.
But it is biological. You can try to obfuscate and use big words all you want, but it is, in fact, biological.
No one said it wasn't biological. Hair color is also biological.
Race is obviously biological.. You can determine someone's ancestry and ethnicity by their DNA...
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PCA-clustering-Principal...
Again, downvoted for being sane
Watson is one of the most openly racist and sexist public figures I've ever seen in person.
Also he devoted the last 15 years of his life obsessed with longevity. Dude took anti-oxidants, tennis, and Vitamin C up the wazoo to keep living longer.
looks like it paid off
Eat goji berries, play tennis, and eat 10x the amount of daily recommended Vitamin C. I will live to be 100
both of them were jerks.
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.
Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes.
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.
It was Gosling's photo.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
The work was given to him by Wilkins who was in his right to do it.
A lot of people care. Love his work, hate the person, feel obligated to rightfully demonize him, not his work.
demonizing anyone shouldn’t be done. it makes the demonizer demonic.
He did that all by himself.
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.
Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal relationship?
Charles Darwin accomplished much without being an asshole.
I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture.
More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not.
Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives?
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
And we need to do this on an obituary?
may I ask which of the following situations is preferrable: an asshole who saves your life, or a non asshole who lets you die because its the right thing to do?
Why would it be the right thing to do to let me die?
I have no dog in this particular fight, but it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't endanger yourself to save someone else. It usually just creates two victims without professional support/equipment.
Just seemed like a fun thought experiment.
why?
Collective action to dissuade assholes from being assholes is a net positive for everyone.
The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are.
There's no dissuading someone from being an asshole.
yup! and I love they are around and celebrated as that helps weed out people not worthy of your time better than most other things
By the time you start advocating for "collective action", you should have defined what the goal of the action is a lot more precisely than "dissuade assholes from being assholes" because a social movement with an ambiguous goal is a menace to society: there is a reason no one want another witch hunt.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.