I found an old review on my computer today—one I’d written for the Times Literary Supplement in 2007. The book under review was Avoid Boring People: And Other Lessons from a Life in Science, by J. D. Watson, and my title was, obviously, “Unlucky Jim”. (Watson had just been dismissed as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories for racist remarks.)
Alas, the piece is no longer online, and I won’t bore you with its contents (my review was mixed), but the end of the piece is an anecdote I’d like to relate.
Whenever I ponder Watson, my thoughts go back to a Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1992—Alumni Day at the University of Chicago. As a colleague and I were chatting in the lab, we were accosted by a rumpled, elderly gentleman with wild wisps of white hair. The man informed us that the room in which we were standing was a teaching lab when he was an undergraduate. My colleague told him that it was now used for research—DNA research. “What do you do with the DNA?” asked the man. Assuming that the visitor knew nothing about molecules, my colleague provided a patient and detailed explanation of how he was determining the sequence of a DNA fragment, using the analogy of coloured beads on a string. The man listened carefully and enthusiastically, sporadically nodding his grasp of the details.
The ageing alumnus finally introduced himself. My friend, who turned a flaming crimson, had been explaining DNA, as if to a child, to Jim Watson, Mr. DNA himself! But, far from being offended, Watson was so pleased that a scientist had taken such time and care to explain his work that he endowed our department with a generous lectureship. That, too, is the real—and complex—Jim Watson.
And, nineteen years later, my department still has a yearly Watson lecture on molecular evolution.
Wow, cool story.
This reminds me of the time I carefully explained the details of the Novikov-Boone Theorem, to, as it turned out, Bill Boone.
Tell us more – what did he say? And do I have to look the theorem up on Wikipedia?
Morris Udall used to say, “Keep your words soft and sweet, because you may have to eat them.”
His dismissal bothered me. While he may have been wrong in suspecting that the black-white IQ/achievement gap has a genetic basis, it’s not like anything he said was unscientific. It is unlikely, given all the variation between ethnic groups in other parts of their body, that the interior of the skull would end up being some kind of (magical?) variation-free zone. It’s certainly a testable hypothesis. It seemed to me that he was only guilty of violating a taboo.
And I don’t like the idea that science has taboos. It might be understandable if the taboo resulted from a phenomenon being studied to such an extent that it would be perverse to have an unorthodox thought (but I still wouldn’t like it). But that’s not the case here…
Setting the scientific value or lack aside, I’ll come at the taboo thing from another angle. It seems to me he might have said vastly more dodgy;controversial things on other topics while preserving his job/status. Bloody Ward Churchill’s academic freedom was widely supported in the academic world by people who disagree with him, and it’s hard to discern anything of value in little Eichmann. Considerably upping the signal/noise, Peter Singer’s work argues forcefully for things like infanticide and euthanasia (and do you really think that’s less intrinsically “challenging” than iffy views about race? [i]Really[/i]?) but the academic world isn’t exactly baying for his blood.
Partly I think it’s just that the political projection of Watson’s views is more far-rightward, while those of WC or PS project more left. I don’t think that explains it though. I assume many American universities would happily hire Henry Kissinger as a visiting prof to teach on a subject of interest (in fact, he taught at Georgetown after an abortive effort by Columbia to “snag” him), and he’s a monster several orders worse than JW could ever hope to be. John Yoo defended the right to crush childrens testicles, but again there’s plenty of support for his academic freedom. There wasn’t a concerted campaign to oust Larry Summers (in the 90s, before the woman thing) for arguing that third world countries are underpolluted given the cheapness of dumping waste there.
Basically I think it’s American / western race guilt co-mingled with the post 60s promotion of identity political concerns by the left beyond just about all others. At least I can’t think of a persuasive reason why JW merits dismissal while PS, WC, HK, JY or LS aren’t beyond the pale.
Although I share the conviction that scientists should be allowed to investigate whatever hypothesis that he or she finds worthy of studying, note that Watson was not dismissed as a research scientist. He was asked to resign as an administrator and as the director of a prestigious research institute whose reputation depends on factors much broader than purely scientific achievements. As one of the most important scientific icons of our time, what Watson says have social impacts. You cannot except his ideas to be understood as nothing more than scientific hypotheses by the public or by the patrons and the board of Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Watson is still active in campus of Cold Spring Harbor Labs.
If allele and trait variation within groups are larger than between groups as it is claimed, who would notice a difference and who would care? Except racists, possibly.
Also, AFAIU allele mixing is gradual and doesn’t follow of artificial borders such as ethnicity. If so, the problem is not that Watson broke a taboo (which, btw?) but that he was wrong on the observations.
I’m not sure what you mean by “gradual”, but there are certainly differences in easily measurable traits such as average height — about 3 inches between Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites in the US, for instance. That variation within groups is larger than variation between groups is sufficient to explain why membership in a particular ethnic group isn’t valid grounds for blanket discrimination, so I don’t know who would care about minor variations except racists and those who insist on political correctness.
The taboo broken is, of course, the prohibition against suggesting that any below average traits of a group are innate. Nobody resists genetic hypotheses proposed to explain above average traits of groups: why Ashkenazi Jews are apparently more intelligent than average or why African blacks are faster and stronger than whites, on average. But if you go the other way, that’s not PC.
His big mistake, scientifically, was a failure to emphasize the amount of variation present in human populations, specifically when he was talking about hiring people. You don’t hire people on the basis of the general statistical average of their gender, nationality or ethnic group but on their own merits, qualifications and achievements.
For a head of a major research center to make it sound like he hires people based on stereotypes or contentious historical IQ studies was political suicide. In his own defense he didn’t try to stick to his guns here, he seemed to realize almost immediately that he had said something very wrong but by that time it was too late.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I reread his words and they do sound like he may have been making a blanket statement about blacks as regards hiring them, which isn’t justified. Even if he had had a number of bad experiences with them as employees, as he alludes to, that should only serve as motivation to improve the selection/hiring process to discern candidates’ merits more accurately, rather than having a blanket bias against one group…
Torbjorn, you said “If allele and trait variation within groups are larger than between groups as it is claimed, who would notice a difference and who would care? ” There are two interesting mathematical errors concealed in that statement, errors committed by almost all geneticists, including Lewontin in his pioneering study of racial differences in humans, “The apportionment of human diversity”, and Russ Lande in his work in ecology.
The usual way to quantify variation in allele frequencies is by heterozygosity or entropy (Lewontin used the latter). Then the within-group variation is subtracted from the total variation to obtain the “between-group variation”. For both heterozygosity and entropy, when within-group variation is high, between-group variation is automatically very low relative to the within-group variation. So when within-group variation is high, it will ALWAYS be the case that between-group variation will be relatively small, even if the two populations have NO alleles in common!!!
Try it with a few examples and you will see what I mean. Even without examples, you can see that this must be the case when using heterozygosity, which has a maximum possible value of unity. If within-group heterozygosity is very high (close to unity), then the total heterozygosity must be higher still (closer to unity) so their difference, which is interpreted as the between-group component, is necessarily close to zero, no matter how different the populations.
It turns out that heterozygosity is not additive (this is well-known in physics–see Tsallis entropies– but not in genetics) so total minus within-group does not give the between-group variation. Also even when it is partitioned correctly, it is not true that the ratio of within/total reflects group similarity. This means the standard measure of genetic differentiation, Gst (1 minus within/total) is also not a real measure of differentiation.
So very much of the population genetics literature is nonsensical. This is much more embarassing than the ill-considered comment by Watson about race.
I didn’t know that. That is interesting!
Very interesting. Can you give some good references or links?
Sure!!! The same mathematical problem arises in both ecology and genetics (ecology’s Gini-Simpson index is genetics’ heterozygosity or gene diversity), so the literature is in both places. Open Google Scholar and search Lou Jost diversity (no quotes). That’s a pretty complete list of papers.
In genetics look at:
Jost, L. (2008) Gst and its relatives do not measure differentiation. Molecular Ecology, 17, 4015–4026.
There are lots of follow-up articles, both favorable and critical, in that journal.
The general theorem for partitioning diversity-related measures is derived in:
Jost, L. (2007) Partitioning diversity into independent alpha and beta components. Ecology, 88, 2427–2439.
This led to a 31 page forum in the July 2010 issue of Ecology; see the Ecology editor’s intro to the forum for a nice assessment of the importance of this:
Ellison, A.(2010) Partitioning diversity. Ecology, 91, 1962-1963.
For a less technical overview see:
Jost, L. (2009a) Mismeasuring biological diversity: Response to Hoffmann and Hoffmann (2008). Ecological Economics, 68, 925–928.
There is currently a lot of discussion going on in the journal Oecologia about this subject.
The same mathematical issues apply to the coalescent of geneticists, and Rao’s quadratic entropy as used by ecologists. For an example of an open-minded geneticist/ecologist retracting his earlier interpretation of Rao’s quadratic entropy in light of my observations, see Hardy, O., and Jost, L. (2008) Interpreting and estimating measures of community phylogenetic structuring. J. of Ecology, 96, 849-852.
There will be an international conference on my partitioning theorem and related subjects in July at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica in Barcelona, Spain:
http://www.crm.cat/Activitats/Activitats/2011-2012/CBIO/web-cbio/default.htm
`Elderly’? `ageing’? … in 1992 JW would have been about 64. This 70 year old objects!
I noticed that too.
Watson looks older than he is.
What a delightful anecdote! And how silly that Watson should have lost his position because of some poorly chosen words. I agree with Adam M. It bothered me too. Even if his words might be expected to have greater impact, and, while no one should take racism in stride, surely it would have been more appropriate to take the great man at his word, that he was trying to do science, and did not mean what he said to be taken as in any way a denigration of an entire race.
As for age… These things are relative, MKray. To young people I am sure I look very old, though “only” 70! No so long ago I would have been pushing at the limits of life. Now, statistically, I have a good chance of living 15 years more, and maybe longer. Then I will look really old!
Watson has a history of making contentious remarks. He famously said that he would like if it were possible to genetically make all women pretty!And spoke on the possibility that melanin skin pigment makes people more interested in sex! (he famously said that this is the reason why you have the latin lover – and the english patient!)
One of his most famous awkward statements is a bit of a double edged sword for critics – that if a gene for sexual orientation was found, women who want to choose to have an abortion to avoid having a homosexual child should be able to do so.
See, I’d argue the first and third of those statements are perfectly acceptable in academic discourse. (The second statement is probably false, but why can’t we speculate about it?) The sexuality and abortion thing, as you hint at, is quite thorny; Watson made clear he had no objection to women (lesbian couples maybe?) selecting gay offspring either. Which means he’s highlighting / making vivid an already existing hidden tension in the standard socially liberal world-view going forward, between reproductive choice and diversity (with regard to gender, disability, sexual orientation, physical traits and what have you). Why the hell should some contrarian type feel uncomfortable teasing out these things? I’d make a similar point about his pretty women thing…it’s about bloody time we started having a non-Godwined discussion about free market genetic selection of offspring traits.
Keep in mind that although Watson was forced to retire from the chancellor position, a new position was created for him. He is still active (or as active as he can be) on the campus of Cold Spring Harbor. He was not asked to pack up and leave or anything like that.
Sigmund points out that Watson has a history of contentious remarks. Certainly he is a great scientist; but there are too many people who are willing to excuse someone’s behaviour or remarks because he or she is eminent.
Who has not made a wrong statement he/she has regretted? The punishment for doing so should not be a worse offense than the original mistake. In fact, if all scientists were harshly punished for their mistakes, where would science be today? No scientists?
As the person who turned flaming crimson in that story, here’s my version, honed by years of retelling:
————————————
I was working in the lab one day when an older man wandered in and started looking around. He was wearing a rumpled suit that looked like he could have slept in it, and he had one of those odd pot bellies that formerly gaunt people sometimes get with age. I didn’t know whether he was a bum off the street looking to steal syringes, or an eccentric alum who might give the University a bunch of money, so I decided to humor him.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“I took Botany in this lab,” he said. “I got a B–I wasn’t good at drawing the flowers.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a research lab now.”
“What kind of research do you do?” he said.
I explained that we studied D-N-A, enunciating each letter clearly, and he smiled and nodded like he was someone who glanced through the science section of the newspaper. “What do you do with DNA?” he asked. I explained that we studied changes in DNA, that some changes in the DNA would change proteins and others wouldn’t, and that we looked at differences in DNA between species and within species as a way of finding evidence for natural selection. Basically, I was explaining the McDonald-Kreitman test without using the words gene, sequence, codon, synonymous, mutation, polymorphism, or allele.
The old man kept smiling and nodding, like he either understood what I was saying or was just being polite. Just then a gregarious Australian post-doc walked into the lab. “G’day,” he said, holding out his hand gregariously, “I’m Bill Ballard.”
“Hello,” said the old man, “I’m Jim Watson.”
———————————-
I don’t remember using the beads on a string analogy, although I suppose it’s possible. And Watson looked much older than 64 at the time; I would have guessed he was in his late 70s.
So Jerry wasn’t there at all?
:- D
Of course I was there! I was working from memory, and I’m glad that John’s account jibes with mine as well as it does!
I don’t remember Jerry being there, but then I don’t remember my labmate Marta Wayne being there either, and she swears she was there for the whole incident. Maybe there were a bunch of people hovering in the background, watching me explain DNA to Jim Watson; after Bill Ballard introduced himself, I mumbled my name, shook Watson’s hand, and slunk embarrassedly away.
That was what my little joke was about – the Rashomon thing – the different versions. Of course Jerry was there! But in your version he doesn’t appear.
But since this was 19 years ago, that’s not even faintly surprising.
Oh by the way, I was there too. Taking notes.
I was there too, and so was my wife (cryptic “Life of Brian” reference) 🙂
I don’t think you have the slightest thing to be embarrassed about — quite the contrary!
You did exactly what any scientist and educator should have done in that situation: feed somebody’s curiosity.
Dr. Watson, I’m sure, figured out right away that you didn’t know who he was and used that advantage to figure out who you were. And, he figured out that you’re a dedicated and sincere scientist and educator while simultaneously satisfying his surface-level curiosity (that you were performing the McDonald-Kreitman test).
It was a test that you passed with flying colors, and Dr. Watson publicly recognized as much when he funded the lectureship.
You both got more than you bargained for, and the university is better off for it.
Cheers,
b&
Not forgetting the quaternion Jim Watson, who wasn’t often seen at work – he just didn’t commute.
Wow that’s some free association! You must not know the octonion Jim Watson.
LOL. Indeed, quaternions are known to be complex.
I think it’s also interesting when you try to apply the criteria used to dismiss JC, to the notorious case of his successor Francis Collins. Sam Harris has an excellent piece on this issue here:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-strange-case-of-francis-collins/
So, suggesting that there might be differences in IQ levels among races (which is quite plausible as witnessed by our understanding of differences in intelligence between canine races) will get you fired, but believing that human beings are morally inferior and deserve to burn forever if they don’t worship the right deity will evidently get you hired for the same position? …. *tilts head in utter bemusement*
If you look up Watsons remarks you will see that it was a bit more than speculation over average IQ levels of different human populations. Even Watson himself admitted he said something very wrong (remember its not that there might be statistical differences, it’s how you treat individuals that is important).
As for Francis Collins – does he really believe in all that burning in hell for non evangelicals stuff?
I get the impression that he is very much evangelical light – probably has no problem with homosexual marriage, womens choice of abortion, hell is just a metaphor etc.
It is probably more accurate to call him a mainstream liberal protestant – where most of the religion is metaphorical apart from a few essentials – Praise Jeebus.
Great story. I love the happy ending!
Great story–both versions!
Thanks for the story Jerry. It’s so easy to forget the wonderful qualities of a person when they’ve disappointed you.
I think the best speech I’ve ever attended was given by Watson, also in 2007, at the alumni convocation ceremony:
http://news.uchicago.edu/multimedia/alumni-convocation-2007