For his comments stating that blacks are less intelligent than whites, James Watson the Nobel laureate biologist was suspended from his longtime job as a research laboratory as a result. Though Watson apologized for those remarks about race, he was suspended from his job and denounced as a racist.
James Watson is known for winning the Nobel prize in 1962 for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA.
He was supposed to go on a book tour of Britain. However, the book tour has been cancelled as well due to the racial comments. The board of trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where James Watson had worked for over forty years has suspended him from the job. There’s supposed to be a review of James Watson that is also pending as a result of the comments about blacks.
This all resorted from an interview with the Sunday Times on October 14. It was said that James Watson was very gloomy about the prospect of Africa. Watson explained that the social policies are based on grounds that their intelligence is the same as ours. He added that the testing says otherwise.
For the book tour, Watson was supposed to sign copies of his newest book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science.” The tour was to promote the new book. First stop would’ve been at the Blackwell bookstore in central London.
They were hoping for rigorous debate of the matter.
While the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is doing a formal review of his comments, the British Civil Rights group known as The 1990 Trust has called to boycott his books. They also called for people to pressure venues to cancel Watson’s appearances.
It is said that this isn’t the first time that Watson made a controversial comment. It is said that in 1997 that Britain’s Sunday Telegraph quoted him saying that if a gene for homosexuality was isolated, women should be allowed to have an abortion for their unborn children that possess it.
Few years later after that, he suggested that skin color and sexual prowess are linked. He also added that a person’s weight and ambition level are also linked. These are just examples of the man controversial statements that James Watson has made over the years.
For this current controversial remark, Watson stated: “To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
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