… co-discoverer of double helix. Here.
In case you didn’t know what else not to like about Watson (who got dumped for racist remarks):
Watson was 79 at the time, and people familiar with his field knew that he was genetics’ embarrassing, cranky old uncle. But this wasn’t the ranting of someone who was losing his grasp on reality. He has always been a horrible human being.
One of his earliest sins: Watson didn’t credit Rosalind Franklin, a chemist also working on DNA at the time, for her crucial research on X-ray diffraction images, without which he and Francis Crick would not have been the first to discover the double helix structure. (Linus Pauling and others were right behind them and would have figured it out.) In Watson’s The Double Helix memoir, he calls Franklin “Rosy” (not a nickname she used), critiques her clothing and makeup, and characterizes her incorrectly as another scientist’s assistant.
Watson was also famously insulting and arrogant as a professor at Harvard, even for a professor at Harvard. Fellow faculty member E.O. Wilson described Watson in the 1950s and ’60s as the “Caligula of biology” for his contempt of scientists who studied anything other than molecules. Wilson wrote that, unfortunately, due to Watson’s stroke of genius at age 25, “He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously.” More.
Well, E.O. Wilson, who wants to give half the planet (not the elite’s half, you may be sure) to wild animals, is just the one to judge, isn’t he!
If you can bear to read the whole screed: Listening to self-righteous progressives tear Watson apart is almost (no, not quite) enough to make one like him.
See also: What am I bid for one used Nobel Prize?
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