Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You mean plagiarized it?
James Watson has died
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Re: James Watson has died
#42Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1]
Re: James Watson has died
#43Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings
Re: James Watson has died
#44[flagged]
both of them were jerks.
Re: James Watson has died
#45[flagged]
Re: James Watson has died
#46Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You mean plagiarized it?
Franklin and her grad student produced key experimental data that corrected and confirmed the model that Watson and Crick were already hard at work on.
Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.
Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.
Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.
Re: James Watson has died
#47Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
You're probably thinking about Mullis, inventor of PCR [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis
No, Mullis wrote the Nature paper on time reversal due to the LSD trip (https://www.nature.com/articles/218663b0)
Re: James Watson has died
#48[flagged]
This is an ignorant take on what really happened. There are many sources online to better understand what happened, you might want to start with the Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5 If you want to attack Watson, his comments on race later in life is a better angle.
[deleted]
Re: James Watson has died
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
lmao that's an extremely charitable take that doesn't comport with other racist bullshit he said
What specificially did he say and why did it upset you? I am genuinely curious, I could google it easily enough, but it's actually more interesting why people have a certain impression of things and how strongly they've interrogated the accuracy of that impression.
> He says that he is "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", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".
[1]
Seems pretty clear that he thought black people had a genetic disadvantage compared to white people. And "all the testing" is simply wrong. What we've found is that Africa is the most genetically diverse area humanity has [2]. To generalize capabilities based on genetics is simply foolish as the pool is far more vast than what you'd find in England, for example.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/the-elementary-d...
Re: James Watson has died
#50Wasn't his partner Crick high on LSD when he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA?
High on unkindness and plagarizing behaviour perhaps for not crediting Franklin when he should. We definitely need a debate on men who did amazing contributions to science but were terrible human beings
"We definitely need a debate on men..."
What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.
In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.