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James Watson selling Nobel Prize

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Y

Yrael

Member
James Watson (who, along with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin - although she was never awarded the Nobel Prize for it - discovered the double helix structure of DNA) is auctioning his Nobel Prize this Thursday in New York after claiming to be a "pariah" because, well...

James Watson, the world-famous biologist who was shunned by the scientific community after linking intelligence to race, said he is selling his Nobel Prize because he is short of money after being made a pariah.

Mr Watson said he is auctioning the Nobel Prize medal he won in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA, because "no-one really wants to admit I exist".

Auctioneer Christie’s said the gold medal, the first Nobel Prize to be sold by a living recipient, could fetch as much as $3.5m (£2.23m) when it is auctioned in New York on Thursday. The reserve price is $2.5m.

Mr Watson told the Financial Times he had become an “unperson” after he “was outed as believing in IQ” in 2007 and said he would like to use money from the sale to buy a David Hockney painting.

Mr Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for uncovering the double helix structure of DNA, sparked an outcry in 2007 when he suggested that people of African descent were inherently less intelligent than white people.

If the medal is sold Mr Watson said he would use some of the proceeds to make donations to the “institutions that have looked after me”, such as University of Chicago, where he was awarded his undergraduate degree, and Clare College, Cambridge.

Mr Watson said his income had plummeted following his controversial remarks in 2007, which forced him to retire from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He still holds the position of chancellor emeritus there.

“Because I was an ‘unperson’ I was fired from the boards of companies, so I have no income, apart from my academic income,” he said.

He would also use some of the proceeds to buy an artwork, he said. “I really would love to own a [painting by David] Hockney”.

---

Mr Watson – who insisted he was “not a racist in a conventional way” – said it had been “stupid” of him to not realise that his comments on the intelligence of African people would end up in an article.

“I apologise . . . [the journalist] somehow wrote that I worried about the people in Africa because of their low IQ – and you’re not supposed to say that.”

In 2007, the Sunday Times ran an interview with Dr Watson in which he said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

He told the newspaper people wanted to believe that everyone was born with equal intelligence but that those “who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.
Mr Watson said he hoped the publicity surrounding the sale of the medal would provide an opportunity for him to “re-enter public life”. Since the furore in 2007 he has not delivered any public lectures.

“I’ve had a unique life that’s allowed me to do things. I was set back. It was stupid on my part. All you can do is nothing, except hope that people actually know what you are,” he said.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/sci...ze-because-no-one-wants-to-admit-I-exist.html

Watson is best known for his work deciphering the DNA double helix alongside Francis Crick in 1953. The discovery revolutionized biochemistry and earned the pair and their colleague, molecular biologist Maurice Wilkins, the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But in 2007 Watson made an incendiary remark regarding the intelligence of black people that lost him the admiration of the scientific community.

That year, The Sunday Times quoted Watson as saying that he felt “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He added that although some think that all humans are born equally intelligent, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Watson’s remarks ignited an uproar. He had to retire from his position as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Sold-out gatherings in his honor were cancelled. Academic centers uninvited him for lectures. His peers condemned him: “He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career,” said Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists. His competitors debunked him: “Skin color as a surrogate for race is a social concept not a scientific one,” Craig Venter, the scientist who raced Watson to sequencing the human genome, said to the BBC in 2007. “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin color will be predictive of intelligence.”

Though outrageous, Watson’s statements were not his first comments to create a public outcry. He had a history of making racist and sexist declarations, according to Time. His insensitive off-the-cuff remarks include saying that sunlight and dark skin contribute to “Latin lover” libido, and that fat people lack ambition, which prevents them from being hired. To many scientists his gravest offense was not crediting Rosalind Franklin—his female collaborator—with helping him deduce the structure of DNA (while often sharing his distaste in her appearance).

But now after many years, Watson’s intellectual hubris has caught up with him and left him an “unperson,” he said to The Financial Times. “No one really wants to admit I exist.”

He said he is selling his prized medallion because he has no income outside of academia, even though for years he had served on many corporate boards. The gold medal is expected to fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million when it goes to auction Thursday, according to a statement from the auctioneers Christie’s (Crick’s medal, which was sold last year, went for $2.3 million).
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http://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...of-dna-forced-to-sell-his-nobel-prize/383288/

Dearie me. I wasn't actually aware of his racism (although I had heard about his sexism and appalling treatment of Franklin). I sincerely hope he one day amends his prejudiced - and obviously very unscientific, given how much education and opportunity affects IQ (which is an unreliable metric of intelligence), and the fact that race itself is largely a social construct - views, but it seems there's very little hope of that.

Buuuut hey, if you have $3 million or so to spare, then a Nobel Prize could be yours!
 
Alx

Alx

Member
I don't see the point of buying a medal for whatever amount. Its only value comes from earning it, otherwise it's just a piece of metal.
Do people buy gold medals from Olympics athletes too ?
 
C

ComputerMKII

Banned
Alx said:
I don't see the point of buying a medal for whatever amount. Its only value is if you earned it, otherwise it's just a piece of metal.
Do people buy gold medals from Olympics athletes too ?
Click to expand...

No. People usually go straight to buying the IOC.
 
O

Orbis Tabula

Member
The article says he's "short of money" but I don't really buy it. It seems to be trying to strike this tone of "he fell into bankruptcy after saying a racist thing" and he's trying to get pity because "he has no income." Then he says "well, except for that other income!"

You're not short on cash if you're hawking your gold medal to buy a painting you really like.
 
Y

Yrael

Member
EskimoJoe said:
The article says he's "short of money" but I don't really buy it. It seems to be trying to strike this tone of "he fell into bankruptcy after saying a racist thing" and he's trying to get pity because "he has no income." Then he says "well, except for that other income!"

You're not short on cash if you're hawking your gold medal to buy a painting you really like.
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These are my thoughts too. :p He's hardly destitute!
 
A

andthebeatgoeson

Junior Member
Mr Watson – who insisted he was “not a racist in a conventional way”
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Has people still supporting him, downplays his racism, blame the response, wants to use his cash to buy a piece of art. Sounds like a conventional racist to me.
 
L

linsivvi

Member
mellz said:
Well Obama won the peace award lol.
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The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke but the selection process is rather different from the other awards. One is determined by politicians while the others are determined by scientists and academics. The Peace Prize isn't even presented in the same country as the others.
 
S

Snow

Member
mellz said:
Well Obama won the peace award lol.
Click to expand...

The process for awarding the peace prize is quite different from the science based ones. They don't necessarily wait until something is established as worthwhile before awarding them. In part because it is much harder to do with what is fundamentally a prize based on a political goal and in part because it is intended (or at least de facto used) to encourage and not just to reward.

The science prizes on the other hand get awarded much more conservatively and at a point where something's scientific worth is fairly well established.
 
C

Chichikov

Member
Someone should buy it and give it to the family of Rosalind Franklin.

Alrus said:
Yeah no. Outside of the Peace Prize the rest of the Nobels are really respectable.

Edit: Well maybe not Economics but nobody cares about that one.
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The Economics prize is not a real Nobel prize.
It's some shit the central bank of Sweden started dishing out in the 70s "in Memory of Alfred Nobel" in an effort to make the dismal science seem more credible.
 
P

ponpo

( ≖‿≖)
Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really"
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What is the testing and the results?
 
D

Dylan

Member
I have this fucked up line of thinking that we should just let old men say whatever they want. It's just interesting to me, to hear this unfiltered old-world style of thinking. Call it a morbid curiosity.
 
kruis

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Joni said:
People that should know better because they should understand there isn't a genetic difference.
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There are genetic differences. Take for instance health. Different races can respond differently on certain diseases. There's also the well known fact that lactose intolerance varies around the globe, western Europeans are almost all lactose tolerant, east asians are almost all lactose intolerant.

Alrus said:
Yeah no. Outside of the Peace Prize the rest of the Nobels are really respectable.

Edit: Well maybe not Economics but nobody cares about that one.
Click to expand...

The Nobel prize for Literature is another laughable prize. The scientific Nobel prizes however are highly respected.
 
Y

Yrael

Member
Chichikov said:
Someone should buy it and give it to the family of Rosalind Franklin.
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I love this idea. If it hadn't been for Franklin's X-ray crystallography data, Watson and Crick would never have been able to formulate their DNA model (she was basically robbed of due credit. It's a shame that Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously).
 
Y

Yrael

Member
Bedameister said:
Yep that's the thing. She probably would have gotten one if she would have been alive.
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Not necessarily - the Nobel Prize can only be shared between three scientists, and the third recipient was her co-worker, Maurice Wilkins (who shared her X-ray crystallography image with Crick and Watson). Franklin was snubbed many times in her life due to sexism, and may well have been overlooked for the Nobel Prize too even had she lived.

Edit: And in fact, having just looked into this further, the rule about Nobel Prizes never being awarded posthumously was not actually implemented until 1974. Rosalind Franklin died in 1958, and Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Franklin was never even nominated. Never mind, posthumous nominations were still not allowed - posthumous awards have occurred on a few occasions, such as Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 and Erik Axel Karlfeldt in 1931, although in these cases their recipients died after being nominated.
 
N

Norua

Banned
His work (even though he isn't the only one) enabled doctors to save thousands and thousands of people.
But yeah, fuck him for having a wrong opinion. Political correctness is more important than life itself for a lot of Americans after all.
 
S

Slayven

Member
You know who should get ta nobel prize?

Henrietta Lacks

Norua said:
His work (even though he isn't the only one) enabled doctors to save thousands and thousands of people.
But yeah, fuck him for having a wrong opinion. Political correctness is more important than life itself for a lot of Americans after all.
Click to expand...

What? His views are straight up racist not an off color joke.
 
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