Nobel Prize-Winning DNA Pioneer James Watson Stripped Of Titles For Insisting Race And IQ Are Linked

Ninety-year-old Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles by a leading American research institution, after doubling down on his controversial conclusions linking race and intelligence.

Despite nearly half a century service to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), Watson, a world-renowned geneticist, lost all of his honorary titles of Chancellor Emeritus, Oliver R. Grace Professor Emeritus and Honorary Trustee, for refusing to retract his own scientific conclusions.

In 2007, Watson was suspended from all of his positions held at the New York lab following a scandal centering around his claim about the "inherently gloomy" future of the African continent. “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 Times newspaper at the time.

Statement by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory addressing remarks by Dr. James D. Watson in “American Masters: Decoding Watson”https://t.co/irMnebcI3K

— ColdSpringHarborLab (@CSHL) January 11, 2019

While having initially issued an apology for his comments, allowing him to maintain his honorary titles at the CSHL, when asked more than a decade later whether his views about race and intelligence have changed, he told the PBS documentary they haven’t.

“Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature,” the scientist was quoted as saying in a recently previewed PBS documentary, titled American Masters: Decoding Watson. “There’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on IQ tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.”