The Science of Racism | Views | TheRoot.com: The Science of Racism
By Henry Louis Gates Jr. | TheRoot.com
Last fall, James Watson, the father of DNA, spoke the unspeakable, saying that blacks are intellectually inferior. In a conversation with The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr., Watson clarified his views about race and genetics. Read what he says now — and why Gates regards him as 'a racialist.'
June 2, 2008--James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, "their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." Watson and his British colleague Crick are remembered popularly for identifying the elegant and unexpected "double helix" three-dimensional structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known as DNA. Watson's important contribution to this uncanny discovery was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA—guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and thymine (T)—combine in pairs to form its structure. These base pairs turn out to be the key to both the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.
