Word: watsons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...very long after James Watson finished his Nobel Prize-winning work on the structure of DNA in 1953, he started firing off some eyebrow-raising comments about his fellow man: that fat people don't get hired because they lack ambition; how sunlight (and darker skin) is the source of the "Latin lover" libido; what he found distasteful in the appearance of his female research collaborator, Rosalind Franklin...
...great geneticist slunk back to the U.S. on Friday - his sold-out U.K. tour for his new book called Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science canceled after the apparently racist remarks he made to Britain's Sunday Times Magazine last weekend - it's clear that Watson's latest provocation is not one he'll shrug off lightly. Indeed, Watson, 79, says he is "mortified" by the imbroglio, and apologizes "unreservedly" for the offending comments, in which he suggested black people are not as smart as whites: he told the Sunday Times' Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe that...
Condemnation was swift. Watson arrived in the U.K. midweek to promote his new book, which will be out Oct. 22. He was scheduled to speak Friday at the Science Museum in London, but the museum announced the day before that it would cancel the event, as Watson had "gone beyond the point of acceptable debate." The University of Edinburgh then axed Watson's scheduled appearance for Monday, calling the scientist's remarks "entirely incompatible with the spirit" of the lecture series in which he was supposed to participate. And an event organizer in Bristol, which had booked the DNA pioneer...
...noon on Friday, a beleaguered Watson had canceled his remaining engagements and was flying back to the U.S. "His decision to leave the country, I believe, was due to things going on at Cold Springs Harbor," says his publicist Kate Farquhar-Thomson, referring to the Long Island lab where Watson is chancellor. Though Farquhar-Thomson declined to speculate what those "things going on" might be, odds are they include the lab board's decision yesterday to suspend Watson's administrative responsibilities...
...seems more shocked by the statements than James Watson himself. "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," Watson said in a statement he issued at the Royal Society Thursday. "That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief...