I wrote about him several times; but especially a defence of him (just about the only defence in the official scientific literature of that time; for which he thanked me) when he was subjected to a lying and evil-motivated Woke/ PC media firestorm as an exemplary-punishment for speaking and writing unacceptable truths.
My colleague Ed Dutton recently published an extremely interesting book about Jim Watson, and was the first to announce his death.
I read Genius under House Arrest in draft and made a few suggestions. Unfortunately the book is too expensive for private buyers; but this is its summary:
In 2007, the Watson Affair – the worldwide character assassination and exclusion from public life of Dr. James Watson, the brilliant, Nobel Prize-winning scientist co-credited with the discovery of DNA – shocked the global public in an early episode of what would come to be called "cancel culture." Watson was as an early and very public victim of incipient wokeism: a warning to others who might be tempted to dissent from favored ideologies of expression and behavior. With the Watson Affair, Western society had changed to the point of inversion; from being broadly supportive of genius, and providing protected niches for those of great accomplishment, to exactly the opposite – a censorious surveillance culture where even minor missteps could result in personal and professional ruin. Genius Under House Arrest explores how this dramatic shift occurred and argues that not only was every "controversial" remark of Watson's empirically accurate, but that geniuses – with Watson as the example – are a package deal: extreme creative ability as a consequence of sometimes difficult personalities, with effects ranging across social, ideological, and professional life. As society has begun to realize, nothing less than the West's culture of merit and achievement is at stake.
Anyway... Watson was the last of the widely-recognized massive-impact great scientists whose achievement could stand alongside those of the past; and he has died.
So now there are none left; and the West publicly, gleefully, destroyed Watson's life and livelihood 18 years ago - and has been stamping on him ever since.
I agree with Ed Dutton that this coordinated action against Watson in 2007 was an inflexion point in our civilization.
It marks the time at which totalitarian evil became dominant, indeed officially unopposed; and from then self-hating self-destruction has been a multi-national strategy - supported by the Globalist Establishment - including the "scientific" establishment.
If real science had died-out by the 1990s, then The Watson Affair was its funeral.
But if you are interested in real science, and have not yet read his marvellous 1968 book about co-discovering the structure of DNA - The Double Helix - then do yourself a favour. It's something I re-read every few years, and always with delight.
**
One of my favourite photos ever; Crick demonstrates the structure of DNA for the cameraman using an improvised slide-rule as pointer - Watson on the left looks-on in awe at the beauty of their discovery.
The moment was superbly re-created near the end of the first-rate movie Life Story - with Jeff Goldblum playing Watson, and Tim Piggott-Smith as Crick.
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