James Watson has died
nytimes.comhttps://archive.ph/KaTaT I want to use this opportunity to shill possibly the best history of science ever written: The Eighth Day of Creation [1], which describes the history of structural biology, including Watson’s various contributions. He comes across as a precocious asshole, not without talent but with a stronger eye towards self-advancement. [1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464... I am adjacent to the field, have read old perspectives, and have worked closely with some of that milieu's students, so that I have gotten my share of gossip from octogenerians who still pick sides in all of this. To spread some of that gossip, one opinion worth mentioning is that the only "real genius" among that group (including Franklin and Wilkins) was actually Crick, and that Watson was precocious but that his real brilliance was clinging to him. It's probably worth mentioning that being a 30 something doing a PhD seems to be a big advantage, though, especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research. Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner. > especially if it's after a decade of doing physics research. Who are you referring to in this? > Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine Someone publicly known? it is also of note that Watson repeatedly made public statements, starting in 2007, asserting that he believed Black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, attributing this to genetics, a claim broadly denounced by scientists and the public as racist and scientifically invalid. Amazing book. Tied with _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ as my favorite non-fiction book. Damn. I love Making, and I'm currently on a Nick Lane/biology bender. Eigth Day is new to me. On my way to the e-book store of my persuasion ... This book slaps. Constructed from interviews the author had with the great biologists and chemists of the era. That's a pretty epic title. And the cover art reminds me fondly of those textbooks from my past that were somehow extremely dry yet captivating at the same time. Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History He was an “interesting” chap. He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps. Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice. Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser. It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made. > “…this opportunity to shill…” Oh? Care to reveal your stake in the success of the book? Whatever, you said “shill”, which means you’re usually an inside man. Just found this app:
https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dileorob/content/apps/photo51.php I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat! James Watson, who helped discover Rosalind Franklin’s notes and notebooks, is dead at 97 He clearly was an exceptional scientist, but also likely an a*hole. Also unfortunately when people get older, many people's negative qualities are amplified. That seem to have happened with Watson and has tarnished his legacy. I think if he had died at 50 his reputation would be much much better, although he is certainly not unique in that regard Who cares? Lots of assholes have done lots of great things. Some of the most important people in history have been assholes. I care. His legacy is tarnished by being a bad human being, when it is pretty easy to be a decent person. It’s worth recognizing the accomplishment without lauding the person. Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson. It was Gosling's photo. Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think. (There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.) How unpleasant, exactly? Watson was an outspoken racist whose remarks led to him losing most of his connections and opportunities, to the point where he had to auction off his Nobel prize in order to survive. But he wasn’t a bad human being. He did things so great they completely outweigh anything you’ve ever done. At the very least, he’s a much better human than you. If we accepted peoples’ completely biased views of what makes a human “good”, that’s how I’d respond. But we don’t, which is why that would be a ridiculous response - just as ridiculous as pretending that being a meanie-head makes you a “bad person”. The work was given to him by Wilkins who was in his right to do it. Those great things were accomplished _despite_ them being assholes and often would have been accomplished by the next person in line anyway who would have just happened not to make an ego trip out of it. A lot of people care. Love his work, hate the person, feel obligated to rightfully demonize him, not his work. demonizing anyone shouldn’t be done. it makes the demonizer demonic. You know you're just virtue signaling that you're demonic yourself with that statement, hypocritically telling somebody not to do something that you're doing yourself. Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole. Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reason? "I know you are but what am I" was funny when Pee-Wee Herman said it ironically and comedically, but not when you do. no, i’m just helping a guy out who’s being mean online. He did that all by himself. Perhaps I should be repentant calling Pol Pot a demonic evil? /s why is it on u to call him demonic evil? Because there are lots of people who do great things who aren't assholes. We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things. Is that really true thought? I can't quantify this but qualitatively it seems like most of the people who accomplished great things really were assholes. I mean even here in the tech industry think of the people we commonly consider great. If you look deeply into their lives and talk to people who knew them personally you'll usually find they were kind of jerks. Is that just a coincidence or could there be a causal relationship? More people are simply more aware of Watson and not Bernal, Klug, Wilkins, Fankuchen, Hodgkin, i.e. other people from that era involved in x-ray crystallography, many of whom made significantly more and larger advances, precisely because he was a self-aggrandizing and controversial asshole while they were not. Are you sure they were not assholes? How much do you really know about their personal lives? I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up. Then call out the ones you know for a fact are assholes and racists, and stop adding to the problem by whitewashing and excusing and carrying their water. I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are. Hold on there buddy, you totally missed the point. I also know lots of brilliant people in the Bay Area tech scene who are not assholes. This thread isn't about brilliant people, it's about those who are commonly considered "great". Like, let's say, Steve Jobs. And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better. Charles Darwin accomplished much without being an asshole. I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture. may I ask which of the following situations is preferrable: an asshole who saves your life, or a non asshole who lets you die because its the right thing to do? Why would it be the right thing to do to let me die? I have no dog in this particular fight, but it's worth mentioning that you shouldn't endanger yourself to save someone else. It usually just creates two victims without professional support/equipment. Just seemed like a fun thought experiment. I don't believe this to be true; is there any evidence? Outside drownings where people can't swim? People save other people's lives all the time. We hear about it and also would hear about people dying in the attempt and yet.. Don't hear much about it. And we need to do this on an obituary? why? Collective action to dissuade assholes from being assholes is a net positive for everyone. The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are. By the time you start advocating for "collective action", you should have defined what the goal of the action is a lot more precisely than "dissuade assholes from being assholes" because a social movement with an ambiguous goal is a menace to society: there is a reason no one want another witch hunt. If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so. There's no dissuading someone from being an asshole. Apparently not. Which is why we should call them out instead of whitewashing them. yup! and I love they are around and celebrated as that helps weed out people not worthy of your time better than most other things Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice? I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control. However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity. Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption... An intervention on the household someone is raised in is not the same as an intervention on race. This is part of what it means when people say racism is a structural problem: people are, systematically, treated differently in many different parts of their lives. The USA is a country where, within living memory, the insurrection act was invoked to allow black children to attend a school which wanted to segregate them. Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/
[2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a....
[3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228 The Minnesota study was done in the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics, long before any operational understanding of epigenetics, let alone the molecular genetics tools used today to attempt to confirm the phenotype/genotype correlations twin studies generate (see: "the missing heritability problem"). All this is on top of the small sample size and lack of controls. The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement." I'll respond by quoting the authors themselves: > "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions." --- It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem. The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument. I know very little about this but just an observer your reply did little to refute any of the points made. You should loosen up a bit and keep an open mind about those points raised because it feels like you’re dismissing them. This is one of those many issues that can be approached at a macro level. Don't think about this as an argument on the internet, but about the implications. Imagine there was compelling evidence for a environmental factor that might even possibly be controlled for. Do you realize how huge a deal this would be? Every single parent wants the best for their kids and would do anything for this. We, socially, already spend an obscene amount of money on education and other factors meaning government support to try to turn this viability into a reality would be through the roof - including in endless support on promising research along these lines. And keep in mind this isn't only for black families - there's a significant IQ deficit between whites and East Asians as well, for instance. But where are these exciting studies on the verge of revolutionizing society? They do not exist. It's kind of like cold fusion. The latest science and research on this topic doesn't really matter. People want to find it and have been searching for decades with promising leads that go nowhere. But if one day they do, you'll know, because it will be something that would have dramatic implications for all of humanity. This is just handwaving. Behavioral genetics, psychometrics, and molecular genomics are thriving fields of study (often in tension with each other, so you even get fun Twitter arguments between the leading lights). It's not our fault you made the risible claim that the MTAS "once and forever put to rest any question of race and intelligence". You brought this up 7 months ago, and when I responded that this is in fact an active field of study with new science being produced constantly, you had no response. I presumed you just conceded the point. If you missed my point last time, well, I've made it for you again: your claim that this research is suppressed is trivially falsifiable. You have in the past stated that race and intelligence can be considered a matter of faith to you and there is no evidence that could ever sway you. So are you sincerely debating here or is this just proselytizing? I'm having trouble even parsing what your comment is claiming that I believe, but either way, this thread is dealing in falsifiable statements, not psychoanalysis. Is this research being suppressed, so that new new science can be done it, thus justifying the claim that a study last updated over 20 years ago is dispositive of racial/genetic/intelligence causality? No, it is not. From this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9674992 Here you said: > If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism. Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable: > His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause. Anyways, I am just interested if you have changed your mind, and you are now treating this as falsifiable or if it is impossible to convince you with any evidence. I think this is useful information for anyone debating you in good faith. You just went back 10 years in my comment history to find a comment that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on a thread that has nothing to do with the thread we're on, on the basis that me not believing that Black people are racially inferior to white people dictates what I think about behavioral genetics. In addition to being rude, it isn't even logically coherent. What I do or do not thing about racial supremacy has nothing to do with the very answerable question about whether behavior and molecular genetics research regarding intelligence is being published. You are arguing to discredit a study that contradicts your previously stated religious belief. I would be very surprised if anyone found me bringing it up off-topic. I think anyone debating you is entitled to know you think it is impossible that a study could find genetic intelligence differences between races and you wont even consider any evidence. If you have changed that belief, it’s easy to state that now. Btw, I just remembered that comment from reading that thread recently. I obviously didnt pour through 10 years of one HN’s most prolific posters. First, the logic you're trying to apply about my "religion" doesn't cohere for the reason I stated. It doesn't follow logically from my belief that certain races aren't superior to others that I believe any X or Y claim about behavioral genetics. Second, and again, as already stated, the arguments I'm making are positive and falsifiable. You can't just bank-shot them through what you believe my psychology to be. Either work on behavioral genetics (including behavioral genetics through the lens of racial groups) is being produced by serious scientific groups or it isn't. It is, as you can trivially verify. Ergo, the claim I made in the post I responded to is falsified. What you think about me doesn't enter into it. So too it goes with the things I said about the MTAS: it does in fact have a small sample, it does in fact have issues with controls (look where they got the adoptees from), it does predate a large amount of scientific work on inherited environment, gene/environment interaction, and epigenetics. Even a hereditarian wouldn't make the claim the parent commenter made, that MTAS is the last word on this question. In fact, given the falsity of claim the parent commenter made on this kind of work being suppressed, it would be weird if it was the last word on the question: scientists have spent 20 years drilling into this, and the result has, among other things, been the "Missing Heritability Problem". You don't even have to know anything specific about MTAS to get the problem with the claim on this thread. You’ve refuted nothing I’ve said. You continue to attempt to discredit a study related to race and intelligence. This is a topic you have claimed a religious position on and said no one should even attempt to convince you in the opposite direction. I'm happy with what the thread says about our respective arguments at this point. As long as you're going back that far in his posting history, why don't you defend some of Eric Raymond's racist quotes that he posted? I bet you really love ESR. Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment. And an actual test for intelligence. Easy, right? The USA is a strange place - in 1964 you had blacks and whites legally required to not sit together on buses, and mobs which attacked and beat people who broke this convention and law. And of course slavery before that. It still rules US politics, the airwaves are filled with politicians denouncing DEI, Black Lives Matter (or peripherally ICE raids dragging mestizo immigrants to prison). It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism. Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs. Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically. He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals. It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise. > Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races. That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women. No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category. It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence. Distributions are distributions. I have not stated anything on the race and intelligence issue. I am just calling out a statistical fallacy. There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start! The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension. Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up. He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence. Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues. Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals. Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland. I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts". This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have. I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms. thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence. For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you." Would you say this is a valid belief? That's like saying: "Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you." When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain. Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results >There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff" SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success: https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un... so is zip code... So first off, no shit the college board things the SAT measures good stuff, it's their test. Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate. Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA? There wasn't ever a "moment" when they "discovered" the structure of DNA. The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom. Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings. I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph? It's important to realize that "Photograph 51" wasn't "Franklin's" -- it was taken by Raymond Gosling, a grad student mentored by Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What happened was that Wilkins chose to share the data with Watson and Crick. Yes, he maybe should have consulted with Franklin first (and certainly with Gosling, whose opinion nobody seems to care about). In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data, [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit yeah, generally the grad students are the ones performing experiments and the mentors are writing grants and helping to interpret data Watson was the main man, that's why we say "Watson and Crick" and not "Crick and Watson". Why did she not get along with Watson, I wonder? I'm not so sure about that -- Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson (who went into administration instead). He also had the mathematical skills needed for interpreting crystallography data that Watson lacked (Crick had studied physics as an undergraduate while Watson had studied zoology). As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours. > Crick had a much more productive scientific career post structure than did Watson... But we are not talking their later work. The issue under discussion is their DNA structure work, and for that Watson wa the main one in their collaboration. > Watson liked to talk and joke around ... This euphemistically dances around the issue. No, they didn't do a "quick analysis". They were in a race with Linus Pauling to figure out the structure. Pauling's son happened to leak the fact that Linus Pauling's lab had a triple helix, so they asked the son casually for notes. That, along with Gosling & Franklin's XRays convinced them that their own original model (and Pauling's) were flawed. Last time I checked, this was basically folklore. There were some allusions to Francis Crick experimenting with LSD, but their DNA work predates that. Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him. You might be thinking of Kary Mullis, who supposedly came up with PCR while riding his motorcycle on LSD. I thought he was driving in his car up a mountain with his wife/girlfriend asleep in the passenger seat. I need to re-read his book Riding a motorcycle on LSD is nuts Mullis was a nutcase. He got banned from at least one conference for including porn in his slides. You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1] No, Mullis wrote the Nature paper on time reversal due to the LSD trip (https://www.nature.com/articles/218663b0) From the Wikipedia page > During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences". He gave a talk at where I worked and did make reference to an LSD trip in reference to the PCR process. Maybe thinking of August Kekulé and the carbon ring [1]? I have read elsewhere it was a "pipe dream". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé#Kekulé's_dream I am not sure. What I do know is that they used to go to pubs, so they probably used to drink pints. Specifically The Eagle in Cambridge. Close to Kings College, and a cosy and storied pub it is. The back bar has photos and soot-signatures of air crews from all over the world, a tradition that started during WWII. High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings "We definitely need a debate on men..." What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them. In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results. > In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior. It’s fair to say Watson should have given more credit to the work of Franklin and Gosling, but to claim it’s “cheating, pure and simple” is clearly revisionist history. Either his conduct was fair or it wasn't (misconduct). You are implying that it isn't without saying it outright, the comment you are replying is clearly calling it misconduct. I think in the spirit of debating you should be more direct and clearly state if you think he engaged in misconduct or not. The outcome of such debate is to look at history with a more critical lens as opposed to just looking at it the way our ancestors did. It is not irrational to deem Watson a terrible human being while also acknowledging his contributions to science. This gives us the clear human perspective of how science has developed across time and the things we can do to ensure we are able to address some of the downsides of the human aspects of science (i.e. sexual harassment, misogyny, etc) You mean plagiarized it? Franklin and her grad student produced key experimental data that corrected and confirmed the model that Watson and Crick were already hard at work on. Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal. Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems. Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model. This is not an honest depiction of the full picture. At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed. Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself. To defend Wilkins, it was John Randall, the director of the lab Wilkins and Franklin both worked in, who probably intentionally pitted them against each other to mess with or motivate Wilkins. Wilkins was possibly the most honorable out of all five people involved in the situation. Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced. In fact, it was a photograph she took 8 months earlier, and she didn't realize its significance or implication. If useful data is shelved, is it still useful? For Watson, the image corroborated the double-helix theory and caused them to focus exclusively on that (instead of triple or single). The photograph itself did not deliver a DNA model. All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating... > she didn't realize its significance or implication. That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her They did collaborate with each other. The labs at King’s and Cambridge shared information at different times. Franklin invited Watson to her lecture. She and Wilkins went to see the double helix model when it was completed. You’re treating a sensationalized version of the story as fact. > All these excuses for a blatant case of cheating The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him. Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it. In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry. Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t completely unheard of in science, at least historically if not today. Would they not have done the same if it were a more junior man? Like sure if he walked up to them and literally gave them the idea, they may not have (in either case), but with the circumstances as I understand them to be, I think this kind of thing happens all the time? > Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism. It isn’t whataboutism, I’m not deflecting. What I’m alluding to is that there is some moral crusade these days about women’s historical achievements that seems to have veered into conspiracy theorist tier paranoia lately. Men weren’t rubbing their hands and twirling their mustaches and stealing women’s inventions to keep them down, there were just more classical gender role norms back then. We can certainly tut tut at the social pressure to stay at home with children back then and how that did prevent some women from inventing things, or how men didn’t take women seriously in industry because that wasn’t their role in the classical role setup, but this notion that men are or were somehow out to get women is silly. If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it. Tell us about how Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, how Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the moon landings, and then repeat this claim. Sure and then you can tell me about Marion Donovan, Nettie Stevens, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Alice Ball, Margaret Knight, Elizabeth Magie, Margaret Keane, Candace Pert, and the hundreds of others. (Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up) Let's see... Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored. I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson. Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself. Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany. Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either. I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook. Didn’t he steal the discovery from the woman who actually took the photo? No, but feminists and white knights maintain that the photo that was actually taken by a man (Gosling) was taken by a woman (Franklin) and that she (Franklin) hadn't given permission for them to steal the photo. They didn't steal it, they saw it briefly and immediately knew what it meant (because they had been preparing hard and already knew most aspects of the structure of DNA) and they were allowed to see it (Wilkins who showed it to them had the right to do so). Neither Franklin nor Gosling understood what the photo meant. Edit: wrote "Wilkinson" by msitake. He will be remembered as a racist. He’ll be joining other racists. Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity.
Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption. The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old. Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows? Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong. Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy. Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs. Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers. Is not being allowed to have children with close relatives also eugenics? They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will. >an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Arguably it is worse. Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back. Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life. Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence. >Einstein >diminished contributions in later part of his life Whew, that's a wild one. What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen? I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing. In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results. It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ? > is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out. What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this: I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing. I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1] I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence. [1] still got downvoted smh How do you define socialism? I see ppl throw around this term without ever defining it. They probably mean a soviet style central government , which of course is terrible. Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top. Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money. Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium. Yeah, I wasn't aware of that writing but I read the Wikipedia article and what it describes seems spot on to me. The article explains what Einstein meant by socialism: "Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with a planned economy where the means of production are owned by society itself" It seems clear he understood it was a tricky problem, and writing at the time many of the potential problems were not apparent: "Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?" I have decades of experience as an unaccomplished nobody and I concur. Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive. > primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that. This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem. Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first. I don't think it's a chicken or egg problem. We still have the non-functional form of the gene for synthesizing vitamin C in our genomes. It's been identified, and the mutation which knocked out it's functionality is known. This was a single event. If the primate who had this variant didn't already have a diet high in vitamin C, it wouldn't have survived. And since their diet was high in vitamin C, they obviously had the sensory apparatus necessary for detecting the food sources > racist things about Irish people It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share. See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose. It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English) How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"? It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne. I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England. >> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish? It is sad, however, that he stole the research of Franklin and by today standards should be stripped from his honors. And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed. A terrible person indeed. He didn't steal anything. Franklin's PhD student took the famous Photo 51, Franklin was credited in the paper [1], and there's much more besides [2]: "We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London." [1] https://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Wa... [2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rosalind-franklin-dna-st... Ah yes, he just took Rosy's pictures (she doe snot deserve her full nale) and then went on discussing what she wears. I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life. She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously. Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world. > If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly Setting your bizarre ranting aside, you appear to have misread - Franklin was the supervisor. It was her PhD student Raymond Gosling who took Photo 51: I used "supervisor" loosely here - both Watson and Crick were hierarchically above her. As for "bizarre ranting" - I guess you have never had anything you did credited to somebody else. Good for you (seriously), but in that case please do not comment about the emotions of others. If you did and think this is fine - well we live in different worlds then. The only thievery here is yours. Just as we are expected to believe that Ada Lovelace invented programming, Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, and Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the Apollo missions all by her lonesome, we must believe this, too. None of it is true, and when this is pointed out, the response is frothing accusations of misogyny that you've so aptly demonstrated. Well, froth away. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and appropriately credited Dr. R. E. Franklin (not "Rosy") in their paper. It is sad to see that whenever gender comes into play, emotions are high. It does not matter that she was a woman - should they have stolen from a man (which here is also the case) they would have been thieves as well. Do not put completely useless gender craziness in this. We are talking about one scientist using dirty methods to hide another scientist. One hundred percent agree with you. This is a perfect example where what's remembered as history is largely influenced by what was told by the victor. Looks like Franklin won, then. By today's standards, if I heard that some random ordinary scientist was stripped of their honors and was being widely labeled a terrible person in internet comment threads, I would seriously consider the possibility that they were the real victim in the situation. Have you ever heard anything he said about women, gays, blacks, etc? He is the kind of guy I would not even approach, while so many people were bowing. This is in addition to his stolen work of course. The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name. RIP you legend. What's with the "is dead at"? I'm not a native speaker but it seems a bit disrespectful. It's a way of communicating his age; it's standard phrasing for American english. No disrespect is implied or intended. There are generally no holds barred when it comes to dunking on people that are truly disliked, and when newspapers want to disrespect someone, they will leave no room for doubt (there are some awfully hilarious examples of such obituaries throughout American history.) "Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56" It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice. This is native English and quite colloquial. It's been used in widespread use in newspapers and in the media since forever. From just recently: > James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97 > ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’ > Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73 > Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103 > Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74 > Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101 > Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70 More famous headlines: > Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1] > Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2] > Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3] > Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-... [2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f... This is normal english. Its not always included. I think they added it to highlight how old he was.97 years is quite the accomplishment, so I don't interpret it as disrespectful. 97 years old... must've had good genes... Oh eu... Seriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity. Plenty of non-paywall links that would be better here eg
Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.
-- Michael Palin