the foobar zone

Looks like Jim Watson, Nobel laureate, has put his foot in it once more, this time for airing his views that black people are less intelligent than white. Oh dear. All scientists are nutters, aren't they?

I first heard him talk a couple of years ago at a public talk in Trinity College, where he delivered his thoughts on 50 years of DNA. It was a fascinating talk in lots of ways; not because what he had to say was very interesting - it was really just a badly-delivered re-hash of a whole pile of history which we all pretty much know anyway, with the usual slight exclusion of Rosalyn Franklin's input into the structure of DNA - but because it gave some level of insight into some of his more, uh, heretical views on life and society.

Don't get me wrong here - I love heresy and heretics. People who don't challenege the status quo will never make any impact on the world. But there's a limit, really, and Watson went well beyond this. It was a fascinating experience to watch a whole audience cringe when someone of Watson's importance started talking about abortion, and that the mother of the child (not the father, he noted, because he shouldn't have any real input on the matter) ought to be allowed to hold off registering the birth of the child for a couple of days just in case she changes her mind about whether she really wants to keep the kid or not.

All of a sudden, there was that uncomfortable shuffling feeling in the lecture theatre, and you could see the panel members grimace in embarrassment.

He later went on to have a private talk session with members of the Genetics Department. On the basis of their more conservative attitude to science, he noted how "europeans really annoy me", apparently not aware of his current geographical location. Oops, he said, "I meant continental europeans". Well, I guess it's better to limit your insults to 40% of your audience rather than 90%.

The problem with all of this is pretty clear. On the one hand, the press tends not to publicise his more outrageous statements, because quite honestly, they are unprintable. But on the other, the guy gives science and particularly genetics a bad name by coming out with offensive crap like this.

So what do you do? Ask him to retire and shut up? Tell him that some of his ideas are really screwed up? I don't know. But he's doing his discipline no favours, that's for sure.

Oh, and he's terrible public speaker too, btw. Truly awful.