Do we like them?

Do we like James D. Watson?

Our score: 3 out of 10. Real science and a lab built over decades, but repeated remarks on race and intelligence that he stood by on camera in 2019.

James Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and was just 25 when he and Francis Crick worked out the double-helix structure of DNA at Cambridge in 1953. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, then went to Harvard. From 1968 he ran Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for roughly four decades. That's the glittering bit, and it is genuinely glittering.

The double-helix breakthrough leaned heavily on X-ray data produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King's College London, and Franklin only got proper credit much later. Watson's reputation for abrasiveness is old news too: the biologist E. O. Wilson once called him “the most unpleasant human being I had ever met”. The two later reconciled, so call it a prickly streak rather than a verdict.

The big blow-up came in October 2007, when Watson told a British newspaper he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa”, and said that people who deal with Black employees find equal intelligence “not true”. He apologised, saying there was no scientific basis for the claim. Cold Spring Harbor removed him from administrative duties and ended his chancellor status, and he stepped down about a week later.

Then 2019 happened. In the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson, he was asked whether his views had changed and answered “Not at all.” The lab responded by revoking his remaining honorary titles, saying the remarks were unsupported by science and effectively reversed the 2007 apology. An apology followed by more of the same doesn't count for anything here.

On the harm check: the pattern on race is in his own words and he repeated it. His 2014 memoir Avoid Boring People also repeated the race claim and suggested nature may help explain the gender imbalance in science, according to STAT. We found nothing verified in the sources we read on climate or LGBTQ+ issues, and nothing about the company he kept, so that's the honest gap. The race and women material is enough on its own.

There's nothing new on him lately: he died on 6 November 2025, aged 97, and this week marks a year. So where does that leave us? The science changed the world and nobody takes that away. But we're asked whether we'd support the man, and someone who doubled down on remarks about race and intelligence on camera, after his own lab cut him loose, fails the harm test, and the personal record is only a mixed bag.