The controversial American biologist James Watson, elevated to the altars of science for being one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, died this Thursday at the age of 97, as his son Duncan confirmed to the newspaper. The New York Times. Watson and his colleague Francis Crick discovered in 1953 that the molecule that holds the instruction manual for living things has a double helix shape. This configuration, similar to two spiraling spiral staircases in which the facing rungs follow pairing rules, allows DNA to create heritable copies of itself. This extraordinary structure is, as Watson himself stated, “the secret of life”.
The researcher, born in Chicago, was only 25 years old when he published the study that revolutionized biology. Watson and Crick deduced the mysterious structure of DNA after observing the images obtained by two scientists, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, at King’s College in London, thanks to a technique called
Watson, chosen in 1988 by the United States to direct the ambitious project to read all human DNA, was ousted in 2007, when, in an interview with the British weekly Sunday timeshe said he was “pessimistic” about the future of the citizens of the African continent. Development cooperation policies, he declared, “are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, when all the evidence says no.” For Watson, equality for people of different skin colors was a nice wish, but “anyone who deals with black workers knows that it’s not true.”
The biologist apologized, forced by global indignation, but was forced to leave his position as rector of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, on Long Island (USA). He went from being a science hero to being a parasite. In 2014 he auctioned off his Nobel gold medal and sold it for nearly $5 million to Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, the owner of a metallurgical emporium.
In 2019, Watson reappeared in an American public television documentary, Decoding Watsonand once again he launched his racist theories without scientific basis. “Between blacks and whites there are differences in intelligence test results. I would say the difference is genetic,” he says in the film. Just two months earlier, the Human Genetics Society of the United States had released a statement, “alarmed by the social resurgence of groups that reject the value of genetic diversity and use distorted or already discredited genetic concepts to reinforce false claims of white supremacy.”
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