RIP

“He demanded I apologize to Summers,” Hopkins said of Watson. (She declined.) “Jim now holds the view that women can’t be great at anything,” and certainly not science. “He has adopted these outrageous positions as a new badge of honor, [embracing] political incorrectness.”

A partial answer to “what happened to Jim?”, she and other friends said, lies in the very triumphs that made Watson, in Hopkins’ words, unrivaled for “creativity, vision, and brilliance.” His signal achievements, and the way he accomplished them, inflated his belief not only in his genius but also in how to succeed: by listening to his intuition, by opposing the establishment consensus, and by barely glancing at the edifice of facts on which a scientific field is built.
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One formative influence was Watson’s making his one and only important scientific discovery when he was only 25. His next act flopped. Although “Watson’s [Harvard] lab was clearly the most exciting place in the world in molecular biology,” geneticist Richard Burgess, one of Watson’s graduate students, told the oral history, he discovered nothing afterward, even as colleagues were cracking the genetic code or deciphering how DNA is translated into the molecules that make cells (and life) work…

Watson nevertheless viewed himself “as the greatest scientist since Newton or Darwin,” a longtime colleague at CSHL told STAT in 2018.

To remain on the stage and keep receiving what he viewed as his due, he therefore needed a new act. In the 1990s, Watson became smitten with “The Bell Curve,” the 1994 book that argued for a genetics-based theory of intelligence (with African Americans having less of it) and spoke often with its co-author, conservative political scholar Charles Murray. The man who co-discovered the double helix, perhaps not surprisingly, regarded DNA as the ultimate puppet master, immeasurably more powerful than the social and other forces that lesser (much lesser) scientists studied. Then his hubris painted him into a corner…

When the friend proposed that Watson debate the genes/IQ/race hypothesis with a leading scientist in that field, for a documentary, Watson wouldn’t hear of it: “No, he’s not good enough” to be in the same camera frame as me, Watson replied, the friend recalled. “He saw himself as smarter than anyone who ever actually studied this” — which Watson had not.

Friends traced Watson’s smartest-guy-in-the-room attitude, and his disdain for experts, to 1953. When he joined Crick at England’s Cavendish laboratory, Watson knew virtually nothing about molecular structures or “the basic fundamentals of the field,” Jerry Adams, also one of Watson’s graduate students, told the oral history; Watson was “self-taught.” He saw his double-helix discovery as proof that outsiders, unburdened by establishment thinking, could see and achieve what insiders couldn’t.

That belief became cemented with his success remaking Harvard biology. The legendary biologist E.O. Wilson, who was on the losing end of Watson’s putsch, called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met,” one who treated eminent professors “with a revolutionary’s fervent disrespect. … Watson radiated contempt in all directions.” But in a lesson Watson apparently over-learned, “his bad manners were tolerated because of the greatness of the discovery he had made.”

Perhaps in reaction to Watson’s sky-high self-regard, in his later years his peers and others began to ask if his discovery of the double helix was just a matter of luck. After all, as a second lab colleague said, “Jim has been gliding on that one day in 1953 for 70 years.”

With Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray images (which Watson surreptitiously studied), other scientists might have cracked the mystery; after all, American chemist Linus Pauling was on the DNA trail. But Watson had something as important as raw skill and genius: “He realized that to discover the structure of DNA at that moment of history was the most important thing in biology,” Mayr told the oral history. Although Crick kept veering off into other projects, he said, “Watson was always the one who brought him back and said, ‘By god, we’ve got to work on this DNA; that’s the important thing!’” Knowing the “one important thing” to pursue, Mayr said, “was Watson’s greatness.”
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That was only the most successful result of following his instinct; whether getting the Human Genome Project off the ground or running CSHL, Watson was a strong believer in finding truths in his gut. “Jim is intuitive,” MIT biologist H. Robert Horvitz told the oral history. “He had an uncanny sense of science and science problems.”

He came to believe in his intuition about something else: race and IQ and genetics. His gut, he felt, was a stronger guide to truth than empirical research or logic. As a result, “he believed what he believed and wasn’t going to change his view,” the lab friend said. “It’s not as simple as courting controversy for controversy’s sake. But as the scientific environment became even less hospitable to [the “Bell Curve” thesis], he became even more adamant. He loved trashing the establishment, whatever it is.”

Watson’s loss of his CSHL position, the rescinded invitations, the pariah status, also had their effect. The setbacks made him “resentful and angry,” the lab friend said. “‘Saying the right thing’ now translated into ‘political correctness’ in his mind. And that made him say even more outrageous things.”…
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At age 90, Watson told friends he did care how history would see him. He did care what his obituaries would say. He knew his racist and sexist assertions would feature in them. Not even that could make him reconsider his beliefs, which only seemed to harden with criticism. Now history can reach its verdict.