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Watson stung by own tale
The study was made possible when he allowed his genome — the map of all his genes — to be published on the Net in the interests of science.
Updated : Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
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LONDON: Dr James Watson — the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who sparked a racism row by claiming black Africans were less intelligent than whites – has more black genes than the average white European.
An analysis of Watson’s DNA profile found he had 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European. His genome showed that 16% of his genes were likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent and a further 9% were likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent. Most people of European descent would have no more than 1%.
“This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African,” Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis told the media. “It was very surprising to get this result for Jim,” he continued.
The study was made possible when he allowed his genome — the map of all his genes — to be published on the Net in the interests of science.
Watson won the Nobel in 1962 with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, after working out the structure of DNA. However he provoked an outcry earlier this year when he suggested that black people were genetically less intelligent than whites. The Science Museum in London cancelled a lecture by him, while Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, branded his comments as “racist propaganda”.
Other scientists working in the field of molecular biology quickly distanced themselves from his comments, saying that it was not possible to draw such conclusions from the work that had been done on DNA.
The 79-year-old American was sacked from his job as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, where he had been working for the last 35 years. Watson had served at the laboratory as a director and president.
His critics savoured the twist of fate. “I never did agree with Watson’s remarks,” said Sir John Sulston, a Nobel laureate and member of the consortium that decoded the human genome. “We do not understand enough about intelligence to generalise about race,” he added.
