+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Biochemistry, Biology & Virology (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-76.html)
+--- Thread: Article James Watson saw the true form of DNA. Then it blinded him. (/thread-19201.html)
James Watson saw the true form of DNA. Then it blinded him. - C C - Nov 17, 2025
Good propaganda example of how vulnerable the sciences (revolving around humans) are to relativistic moral interpretations of data. How they can also be intermittently or persistently regulated by rival politics and collectivist pseudoscience, where certain things become eternally taboo and others sacred, no matter what future evidence or reality discloses. The ideological giveaway here is the classic Marxist reference and the cultural hegemony rhetoric spouted at the end.
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
James Watson Saw the True Form of DNA. Then It Blinded Him.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/opinion/james-watson-dna.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k8.N-4b.f-2CQ-2edwWR&smid=url-share
EXCERPT: Genetic determinism is one of those one-single-technofix-will-solve-everything ideas that visionaries can fall prey to, and the history of genetics is lousy with hereditarians promising to end disease, make us smarter and better our society. We’re drawn to magic bullet solutions that cannot solve complex social problems. It is all too easy for someone who makes a genuinely profound discovery to think he found the secret of life, or the environment, or disease.
Ironically, Dr. Watson’s preoccupation with genetic determinism was far from predetermined. Some of his contemporaries began entertaining eugenics ideas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and called for deeper studies into claims that I.Q. measured human intelligence and varied across different races. But Dr. Watson stayed out of this eugenics boomlet, even after becoming director of Cold Spring Harbor in 1968.
So what changed? Why did he later become receptive to ideas he had once found repugnant?
Recombinant DNA happened. DNA sequencing happened. The Human Genome Project happened. Like scientists before him, Dr. Watson got carried away by a pretty but simplistic model of the gene that seemed able to explain everything. He had been interested in the gene all his adult life. But by the time he became head of the Human Genome Project, he identified with it. Through the 1980s and ’90s, DNA motifs were incorporated into the fabric of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory — from outdoor sculpture to a 65-foot-tall bell tower.
DNA also became personal. When his older son developed mental illness, Dr. Watson would repeatedly say that he found comfort in the idea that his son merely got a bad roll of the “genetic dice.” Dr. Watson shared this notion with many other families living with genetic illness. On some level, if something is “in your genes,” you’re absolved, it’s not your fault. In this way, genetic determinism is like astrology. Indeed, Dr. Watson himself once said: “We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.”
An obsession with the gene, of course, is not a complete explanation for why racist ideas resonated with Dr. Watson — who was bourgeois, Anglophiliac and Eurocentric, proudly elitist and rather fond of the mid-1950s patriarchy. For “The Bell Curve” to strike such a chord, some part of him had to already be receptive to its arguments... (MORE - missing details)