This giant of biology has recently passed at the age of 97, leaving behind a coloured legacy. What's the verdict? Gifted pioneer of scientific inquiry or scheming, bigoted plagiarist? There is no middle ground.

https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2025/11/19/an-irish-perspective-james-watson-1928-2025-the-dna-titan-with-a-downside/

29 minutes ago, xenog123 said:

This giant of biology has recently passed at the age of 97, leaving behind a coloured legacy. What's the verdict? Gifted pioneer of scientific inquiry or scheming, bigoted plagiarist? There is no middle ground.

https://www.irishtimes.com/science/2025/11/19/an-irish-perspective-james-watson-1928-2025-the-dna-titan-with-a-downside/

Why not both? Most people are a mixed bag.

Newton was by all accounts an unpleasant man, Einstein was sexually unfaithful, Mozart had a scatological sense of humour…..

This notion that famous people must be pigeonholed as either saints or devils seems very naïve to me.

1 hour ago, xenog123 said:

This giant of biology has recently passed at the age of 97, leaving behind a coloured legacy. What's the verdict? Gifted pioneer of scientific inquiry or scheming, bigoted plagiarist? There is no middle ground.

Why? These would seem to be pretty much orthogonal. One can be a gifted researcher and a bigot, and also a stealer of lab notes. And getting or taking credit for others’ work is not an uncommon occurrence. PIs, for example, routinely get credit for work done by their students, even when they are doing far more administrative work than research.

Oh well that was supposed to be a joke, poking fun at the public/media's tendency to hyperbolize or simplify. Of course the reality is more complicated.

17 minutes ago, xenog123 said:

Oh well that was supposed to be a joke, poking fun at the public/media's tendency to hyperbolize or simplify. Of course the reality is more complicated.

Haha, then.

10 hours ago, exchemist said:

Why not both? Most people are a mixed bag.

That's funny, I used the same phrase, mixed bag, on the SFC thread.

He was sort of a mixed bag so far as science idols go. Still, helping find the DNA structure and being paterfamilias of Cold Spring Harbor ain't chopped liver. He seemed to suffer a syndrome common among aging Nobelists, going off the rails. Cold Spring had to disown him as I recall. The cringeworthy eugenics (Crick had a similar trajectory in late career) and Designer Baby shit. I found his edging out Rosalind Franklin from credit for the double helix, and dissing her in his bestseller unforgivable.

Watson basically stole a Nobel from her, imo. Then slandered her after she died. It's pretty reprehensible and goes way beyond poaching from grad students.

12 minutes ago, TheVat said:

That's funny, I used the same phrase, mixed bag, on the SFC thread.

Watson basically stole a Nobel from her, imo. Then slandered her after she died. It's pretty reprehensible and goes way beyond poaching from grad students.

In my mind it is in some ways even worse. When I read his paper as an undergrad, I could not shake the feeling that I just didn't get it. The paper was fairly short, didn't really show any data and the "only" remarkable thing about it, is that he was actually right. However, in my mind this is not how science should work. We have to show data and demonstrate that the conclusion you arrived at is the only one possible. That is what well designed experiments are for. Or, at minimum present the possible answers based on the data you were able to generate and discuss those.

Yet the original paper by Watson on Crick doesn't really do that. It mostly proposes a model, based on one possible interpretation, based on the data Franklin generated. I really never reconciled that feeling until at one point I was dabbling in crystallography and dug out Franklins' criminally paper (which was cited only a fraction of Watson and Crick's paper). There I found clear as day that the resolution they had was simply insufficient to clearly rule out confirmations other than the B-form. Franklin in her paper makes it really clear and proposes the right-handed double-helix as one of the possible configurations, which IMO was the right call.

IOW Watson and Crick they had the right idea but didn't actually put the work in to provide evidence. They just postulated it and happened to be right. And this is one of the things that is a problem in science, that folks that are considered "towering" can make calls without having the evidence (or even putting their own time into it) and are declared heroes when they happen to be right (and often just conveniently forget the times they weren't). Other folks, especially women, or other in the old boy's club OTOH have to work harder for less recognition. It took me way too long to realize what I didn't like about the paper that has been lionized and that realization has sufficiently soured my view on Watson as a scientist.

While I never met Watson, I have met folks who were a visiting scholar in his lab. Suffice to say that there was nothing that really there that could have improved my view on him as a person, either, even before the allegations were widespread.

In a broader sense, it is emblematic for the desire of folks, including scientists, to have visible rockstar researchers. Lionizing those rarely benefits science and more often than not it takes away oxygen (and funding) away from those that are doing steady work without overselling it.

In my mind his legacy is not particularly complicated in isolation. The only complicated thing is what folks made out of it.

I had no idea, his book "DNA" was very good and "Watson and Crick" is synonymous with "Giant of science/Great achievement" or so I thought.

I put in dispatched in PF and a biologist said he was more interested in Jimmy Cliff!

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

That's funny, I used the same phrase, mixed bag, on the SFC thread.

Watson basically stole a Nobel from her, imo. Then slandered her after she died. It's pretty reprehensible and goes way beyond poaching from grad students.

Is that actually what happened? Biology is my weakest scientific subject but just reading a few articles about the incident it doesn't seem like it was anywhere near that bad. From what I gather Franklin contributed some useful piece of data that was indirectly/accidentally passed to Watson and Crick through a middleman, who then used it in conjunction with other findings to formulate the double helix theory proper. Watson himself much later admitted that she should have been (posthumously) awarded a Nobel prize if that were possible.

6 hours ago, CharonY said:

In my mind it is in some ways even worse. When I read his paper as an undergrad, I could not shake the feeling that I just didn't get it. The paper was fairly short, didn't really show any data and the "only" remarkable thing about it, is that he was actually right. However, in my mind this is not how science should work. We have to show data and demonstrate that the conclusion you arrived at is the only one possible. That is what well designed experiments are for. Or, at minimum present the possible answers based on the data you were able to generate and discuss those.

Yet the original paper by Watson on Crick doesn't really do that. It mostly proposes a model, based on one possible interpretation, based on the data Franklin generated. I really never reconciled that feeling until at one point I was dabbling in crystallography and dug out Franklins' criminally paper (which was cited only a fraction of Watson and Crick's paper). There I found clear as day that the resolution they had was simply insufficient to clearly rule out confirmations other than the B-form. Franklin in her paper makes it really clear and proposes the right-handed double-helix as one of the possible configurations, which IMO was the right call.

IOW Watson and Crick they had the right idea but didn't actually put the work in to provide evidence. They just postulated it and happened to be right. And this is one of the things that is a problem in science, that folks that are considered "towering" can make calls without having the evidence (or even putting their own time into it) and are declared heroes when they happen to be right (and often just conveniently forget the times they weren't). Other folks, especially women, or other in the old boy's club OTOH have to work harder for less recognition. It took me way too long to realize what I didn't like about the paper that has been lionized and that realization has sufficiently soured my view on Watson as a scientist.

While I never met Watson, I have met folks who were a visiting scholar in his lab. Suffice to say that there was nothing that really there that could have improved my view on him as a person, either, even before the allegations were widespread.

In a broader sense, it is emblematic for the desire of folks, including scientists, to have visible rockstar researchers. Lionizing those rarely benefits science and more often than not it takes away oxygen (and funding) away from those that are doing steady work without overselling it.

In my mind his legacy is not particularly complicated in isolation. The only complicated thing is what folks made out of it.

Franklin herself didn't actually explicitly advance the double helix model in any of her published work as far as I know - she just made the weaker claim that the DNA strands were anti-parallel and that a helical model was one possibility.

As for Watson and Crick "just postulating [the double helix theory] and happening to be right" that's actually the more interesting and challenging part of science imo, not just gathering and analyzing data but making imaginative conjectures about what may explain the data. You make it sound like this was only justified as an appeal to authority or something but that's basically how science has always worked.

7 hours ago, TheVat said:

That's funny, I used the same phrase, mixed bag, on the SFC thread.

Watson basically stole a Nobel from her, imo. Then slandered her after she died. It's pretty reprehensible and goes way beyond poaching from grad students.

That's not the impression given by the Wiki article on Watson, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin.

According to that, Watson said she should have got the Nobel with Wilkins, but the prize could not be awarded posthumously (she died at 37, of ovarian cancer, apparently). But I don't know who wrote the Wiki piece of course.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

That's not the impression given by the Wiki article on Watson, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin.

According to that, Watson said she should have got the Nobel with Wilkins, but the prize could not be awarded posthumously (she died at 37, of ovarian cancer, apparently). But I don't know who wrote the Wiki piece of course.

Well the reference is a page from the official Nobel prize website that states Watson said that in an interview.

Edited November 25Nov 25 by xenog123
undid auto-merge

2 hours ago, xenog123 said:

Well the reference is a page from the official Nobel prize website that states Watson said that in an interview.

Yes that reference says Watson made this remark in a recent interview with Scientific American. So it looks as if no one at the time thought to put Franklin’s name forward. Maybe this was an attempt by Watson to put things straight at the end of his life, long after the damage was done. It’s such a shame she died so young. If she had lived longer, she probably would have had her contribution recognised.

4 hours ago, xenog123 said:

As for Watson and Crick "just postulating [the double helix theory] and happening to be right" that's actually the more interesting and challenging part of science imo, not just gathering and analyzing data but making imaginative conjectures about what may explain the data.

I disagree. Every scientist has pet theories in their field of study. Most of them will turn out to be wrong and some will happen to be right. The hard work is not coming up with them, but to provide evidence. Franklin looked at the data and proposed the various possibilities based on that. She specifically pointed out the high likelihood of a helical structure in the first paper. But as mentioned, the measurement accuracy did not allow for a fully resolved structure. Nowadays, you wouldn't be able to publish a paper on how you think the 3D structure is, without getting sufficient resolution. Rather, you would need to outline the possible variations, though you could discuss what you favor.

Again, reading Franklin's paper's and the Watson & Crick one side by side, one is to m e a proper crystallography paper, the other one is merely putting forward a hypothesis. Just because they pushed it harder doesn't make it better in my mind.

4 hours ago, xenog123 said:

You make it sound like this was only justified as an appeal to authority or something but that's basically how science has always worked.

What you describe is essentially taking imaginary leaps based on incomplete data. It is fine for building hypotheses, but providing evidence is so much more important. There are folks, including scientists but also increasingly influencers who built careers from overselling their pet hypotheses based on incomplete data. The most obvious offenders are in the health sector which is full of grift and overselling health advice and products mostly based on overselling limited biological data. It is a non-zero chance that at least one of those folks happen to be correct, but we wouldn't (and shouldn't) just take their word for it. Rather we should continue to collect evidence until we can tell.

21 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Yes that reference says Watson made this remark in a recent interview with Scientific American. So it looks as if no one at the time thought to put Franklin’s name forward. Maybe this was an attempt by Watson to put things straight at the end of his life, long after the damage was done. It’s such a shame she died so young. If she had lived longer, she probably would have had her contribution recognised.

Eh, in his autobiography he severely downplayed Franklin's role. While he might have reconsidered his stance later on, I am not confident that he would have recognized her contributions around the time the Nobel came around.

Incidentally, the Nobel Price committee had another serious issue with sexism a while earlier with a true titan in natural sciences: Marie Curie. For her first Nobel, she wasn't even considered until her husband refused to accept one without her as an equal partner on it.

A lot of scientists do some things that are detestable.
@exchemist has already mentioned some, but R Feynman liked dating female undergrads, F Haber and W Heisenberg were staunch NAZI supporters, and @swansont has been accused of being an authoritarian moderator ( 😄😄 ).

Accomplishments and character have little to do with each other.
I can even admire B Mussolini for making the trains run on time, and A Hitler for rebuilding the German economy, while detesting the methods used to accomplish such things.

32 minutes ago, MigL said:

A lot of scientists do some things that are detestable.
@exchemist has already mentioned some, but R Feynman liked dating female undergrads, F Haber and W Heisenberg were staunch NAZI supporters, and @swansont has been accused of being an authoritarian moderator ( 😄😄 ).

Accomplishments and character have little to do with each other.
I can even admire B Mussolini for making the trains run on time, and A Hitler for rebuilding the German economy, while detesting the methods used to accomplish such things.

Well, just to nitpick Haber (a Christianized Jew) was actually opposed to Nazism. He was initially an ardent German nationalist and chemical warfare enthusiast, however.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

I disagree. Every scientist has pet theories in their field of study. Most of them will turn out to be wrong and some will happen to be right. The hard work is not coming up with them, but to provide evidence. Franklin looked at the data and proposed the various possibilities based on that. She specifically pointed out the high likelihood of a helical structure in the first paper. But as mentioned, the measurement accuracy did not allow for a fully resolved structure. Nowadays, you wouldn't be able to publish a paper on how you think the 3D structure is, without getting sufficient resolution. Rather, you would need to outline the possible variations, though you could discuss what you favor.

Again, reading Franklin's paper's and the Watson & Crick one side by side, one is to m e a proper crystallography paper, the other one is merely putting forward a hypothesis. Just because they pushed it harder doesn't make it better in my mind.

What you describe is essentially taking imaginary leaps based on incomplete data. It is fine for building hypotheses, but providing evidence is so much more important. There are folks, including scientists but also increasingly influencers who built careers from overselling their pet hypotheses based on incomplete data. The most obvious offenders are in the health sector which is full of grift and overselling health advice and products mostly based on overselling limited biological data. It is a non-zero chance that at least one of those folks happen to be correct, but we wouldn't (and shouldn't) just take their word for it. Rather we should continue to collect evidence until we can tell.

Eh, in his autobiography he severely downplayed Franklin's role. While he might have reconsidered his stance later on, I am not confident that he would have recognized her contributions around the time the Nobel came around.

Incidentally, the Nobel Price committee had another serious issue with sexism a while earlier with a true titan in natural sciences: Marie Curie. For her first Nobel, she wasn't even considered until her husband refused to accept one without her as an equal partner on it.

Yes that’s true but Marie Curie’s prize was about half a century earlier, back in 1903. Women’s emancipation had moved on a fair bit in the intervening years.

I do dimly recall a rather catty comment in a lecture, from an old-fashioned (gay/misogynist) don at Oxford in the 1970s when I was reading for my degree, to the effect that Franklin’s contribution was the sort of humdrum, painstaking fiddly work suitable for a woman, as opposed to the brilliant insight of Crick and Watson. A bit shocking; perhaps there was a rather broader attempt to belittle the work that actually provided the data!

9 minutes ago, exchemist said:

A bit shocking; perhaps there was a rather broader attempt to belittle the work that actually provided the data!

Not only providing the data, but a careful interpretation of the precise elements of it.

10 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Franklin’s contribution was the sort of humdrum, painstaking fiddly work suitable for a woman, as opposed to the brilliant insight of Crick and Watson.

This is, unfortunately very common. A researcher I worked with, which is a powerhouse in the area of crystallography had similar stories about her advisor, whose career was built significantly based on her "fiddly" work with advanced their field significantly. Based on the stories, he was aware that, too, a he took her in as a postdoc, but torpedoed job offers she got for faculty positions.

14 minutes ago, exchemist said:

es that’s true but Marie Curie’s prize was about half a century earlier, back in 1903. Women’s emancipation had moved on a fair bit in the intervening years.

To some degree, yes. But in sciences it lagged quite a bit behind. I am fairly confident that in the 60s the issue persisted. Mayer, who won a joint Nobel was delegated to a research assistant for much of a career, despite advancing the field significantly.

That being said, to me the sexism is just an addition to the story, I very much prefer a careful investigation and analysis of generated data, rather than presenting the most exciting and attention-seeking one. I will add that coming from the experimental field, I am of course somewhat biased. But even theoretical models tend to have to pass either independent validation or have some sort of mathematical proof.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

A Hitler for rebuilding the German economy,

Eh, the economy was rebuilt before the crash. And Hitler's recovery was built on war economy deficit spending, which is not really rebuilding but just taking on a huge credit with the hope of making the occupied nation pay.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

Accomplishments and character have little to do with each other.

In Watson's case, at least from my point of view, Franklin's paper was much better as it more closely followed the available data. At least from my reading I see two papers, one loud and brazen and the other careful and meticulous. Yet only one gets all the credit.

1 hour ago, CharonY said:

I disagree. Every scientist has pet theories in their field of study. Most of them will turn out to be wrong and some will happen to be right. The hard work is not coming up with them, but to provide evidence. Franklin looked at the data and proposed the various possibilities based on that. She specifically pointed out the high likelihood of a helical structure in the first paper. But as mentioned, the measurement accuracy did not allow for a fully resolved structure. Nowadays, you wouldn't be able to publish a paper on how you think the 3D structure is, without getting sufficient resolution. Rather, you would need to outline the possible variations, though you could discuss what you favor.

Again, reading Franklin's paper's and the Watson & Crick one side by side, one is to m e a proper crystallography paper, the other one is merely putting forward a hypothesis. Just because they pushed it harder doesn't make it better in my mind.

What you describe is essentially taking imaginary leaps based on incomplete data. It is fine for building hypotheses, but providing evidence is so much more important. There are folks, including scientists but also increasingly influencers who built careers from overselling their pet hypotheses based on incomplete data. The most obvious offenders are in the health sector which is full of grift and overselling health advice and products mostly based on overselling limited biological data. It is a non-zero chance that at least one of those folks happen to be correct, but we wouldn't (and shouldn't) just take their word for it. Rather we should continue to collect evidence until we can tell.

Eh, in his autobiography he severely downplayed Franklin's role. While he might have reconsidered his stance later on, I am not confident that he would have recognized her contributions around the time the Nobel came around.

Incidentally, the Nobel Price committee had another serious issue with sexism a while earlier with a true titan in natural sciences: Marie Curie. For her first Nobel, she wasn't even considered until her husband refused to accept one without her as an equal partner on it.

I still don't really agree. Rosalind's data only suggested a helical structure, there were still many other parameters to fill, and Watson and Crick based their hypothesis on quite a bit more data apart from hers.

The basic loop of scientific work is data -> hypothesis -> prediction -> (dis)/confirmation, which is what they followed. You have some observed phenomena, propose a more general model based on that, and then test the theory based on the predictions it makes for unobserved phenomena. Strictly speaking there's no such thing as "complete" data for any hypothesis because of the problem of induction, so there's always a bit of a leap of faith involved in conjecturing. And haven't you seen those Einstein quotes in dentist's office waiting rooms? Imagination is more important than knowledge.

1 hour ago, MigL said:

and @swansont has been accused of being an authoritarian moderator ( 😄😄 ).

My coup was by the books.

4 minutes ago, xenog123 said:

... And haven't you seen those Einstein quotes in dentist's office waiting rooms? Imagination is more important than knowledge.

They are still just spontaneous brain farts, it's just that some hit the bull's eye of reflecting nature. You've still got to do the slog of describing them in concordance with existing consensus in that field. Nothing stands alone in a vacuum.

Edited November 25Nov 25 by StringJunky

31 minutes ago, StringJunky said:

They are still just spontaneous brain farts, it's just that some hit the bull's eye of reflecting nature. You've still got to do the slog of describing them in concordance with existing consensus in that field. Nothing stands alone in a vacuum.

Hmm you don't think there's some factor that could make people/systems better at connecting the dots? That's what the g-factor is supposed to represent.

I've actually thought about this a bit in some of my amateur research on AI - does scientific discovery or induction basically just boil down to brute-forcing over the space of potential explanatory models when something unexplainable is observed or is there some underlying structure that could be exploited for faster learning? (Straying from the point now).

In terms of "accordance with consensus" you do still have paradigm shifts occasionally.

At least Jocelyn Bell lived to receive extensive recognition in the scientific community and her contribution to the Nobel was arguably more significant than Franklin.

They were products of the time, women, not as per men. Seems crazy today but at least we can say our society has moved forward quite quickly in this respect.

Perhaps quicker within science than the wider community.

I checked out Watson's controversial comments, not good.

Crazy thing is, if Watson would have reviewed fairly recent high school demographics for examination achievements, A levels and University entrants, he would have found that white males under perform against other ethnic groups.

So we (white British males) not the best lovers and not that bright either.

The best gardeners on the planet though.

1 hour ago, pinball1970 said:

At least Jocelyn Bell lived to receive extensive recognition in the scientific community and her contribution to the Nobel was arguably more significant than Franklin.

They were products of the time, women, not as per men. Seems crazy today but at least we can say our society has moved forward quite quickly in this respect.

Perhaps quicker within science than the wider community.

I checked out Watson's controversial comments, not good.

Crazy thing is, if Watson would have reviewed fairly recent high school demographics for examination achievements, A levels and University entrants, he would have found that white males under perform against other ethnic groups.

So we (white British males) not the best lovers and not that bright either.

The best gardeners on the planet though.

Hmm interesting - do you have a link for the under-performing white male stats? Watson did also say that Chinese males have a higher average IQ so he might not have been completely out to lunch haha. Also have to consider the effect of demoralization psy-ops against white males in the Anglosphere (maybe that's a paranoid take).

I recall reading a study a while ago that found that the number of super high IQ males had been declining to the point of vanishing in the West since like the 1970s or something, which was pretty weird. Have to wonder at what might cause that, assuming such a report is accurate. One theory behind the disparity between the sexes in STEM achievement had been the greater variability hypothesis, so it'd be interesting to see why that might be incorrect or a fading phenomena if it was true in the past.

Just now, xenog123 said:

I still don't really agree. Rosalind's data only suggested a helical structure, there were still many other parameters to fill, and Watson and Crick based their hypothesis on quite a bit more data apart from hers.

Except they didn't. Their paper really did not add any data. It was explicitly written as a model proposal and as far as I recall they only vaguely indicate that their model is based on some data, while acknowledging that independent verification is needed (or something to that extent). There have been different narratives on how that paper came to pass, but in one of them both basically fiddled around with models to try to see what fits the existing information. At that point however, both A and B forms were likely and some of Franklin's data pointed more towards A, which makes sense, as it is more ordered and more likely to occur during the crystallization process. I think Watson at some point also commented that he was luck not to seen Franklin's full data set as it would have undermined his model a fair bit.

2 hours ago, xenog123 said:

data -> hypothesis -> prediction -> (dis)/confirmation, which is what they followed. You have some observed phenomena, propose a more general model based on that, and then test the theory based on the predictions it makes for unobserved phenomena.

And that is what Franklin was doing- proposing multiple models in alignment with her data. Watson pushed one more but not based on existing evidence or further confirmation. Jumping the line, so to speak.

1 hour ago, xenog123 said:

Hmm you don't think there's some factor that could make people/systems better at connecting the dots? That's what the g-factor is supposed to represent.

Or ego. After all, people tend to forget all the times you were wrong and if your ego can take it, more power to you.

1 hour ago, pinball1970 said:

Perhaps quicker within science than the wider community.

I don't really think so. In some ways yes, but only in fairly recent times.

7 minutes ago, xenog123 said:

Watson did also say that Chinese males have a higher average IQ so he might not have been completely out to lunch haha.

That statement likely was based on the horrible book "The Bell Curve" a rather controversial book that tries to make a quasi biological argument for race. In most serious areas of genetic and related research it has been severely discredited (and serves as a cautionary tale if folks like e.g. psychologists extrapolate things in other disciplines based on their own).

12 minutes ago, xenog123 said:

Also have to consider the effect of demoralization psy-ops against white males in the Anglosphere (maybe that's a paranoid take).

We don't, actually, because this is a science forum not a Far Right garbage conspiracy theories forum. White males who get demoralized because brown people and women turned out to be smart at science too are responsible for their own biases and mood disorders. If that causes them to stomp their feet and blow off study sessions, then maybe they're too fragile to do science. Best leave it to people who know how to work hard.