A while ago when I was in grad school, Watson was giving a talk, so I decided to attend. I told people I knew I was going and the general response was "yeeeeeah, you should go see him once and then you will never want to again".
He started off the talk by first saying that the story about how he stole Franklin's images wasn't true and that she shared them with him. The rest of the talk was mostly self-aggrandizement about how awesome he was, along with constantly talking shit about his contemporaries, and how they would have figured out the structure of DNA earlier if they weren't such massive pieces of shit and listened to anyone else. He was particularly hateful of Chargaff and Linus Pauling. There were also "fun" anecdotes about how the only reason he came to Harvard was to be a professor and find a wife, and once he did that he left.
Overall, just a very hateful, egotistical, and wildly misogynistic person. And he still got a standing ovation at the end because he's James Watson.
It is crazy to think there are people alive today that lived in an era where almost nothing was known about DNA. Now it’s such a fundamental part of our understanding of biology. We’ve come extremely far in a short period of time
scizzix on November 7th, 2025 at 20:56 UTC »
Story time:
A while ago when I was in grad school, Watson was giving a talk, so I decided to attend. I told people I knew I was going and the general response was "yeeeeeah, you should go see him once and then you will never want to again".
He started off the talk by first saying that the story about how he stole Franklin's images wasn't true and that she shared them with him. The rest of the talk was mostly self-aggrandizement about how awesome he was, along with constantly talking shit about his contemporaries, and how they would have figured out the structure of DNA earlier if they weren't such massive pieces of shit and listened to anyone else. He was particularly hateful of Chargaff and Linus Pauling. There were also "fun" anecdotes about how the only reason he came to Harvard was to be a professor and find a wife, and once he did that he left.
Overall, just a very hateful, egotistical, and wildly misogynistic person. And he still got a standing ovation at the end because he's James Watson.
doyouevenIift on November 7th, 2025 at 22:30 UTC »
It is crazy to think there are people alive today that lived in an era where almost nothing was known about DNA. Now it’s such a fundamental part of our understanding of biology. We’ve come extremely far in a short period of time
Tenchiro on November 7th, 2025 at 22:36 UTC »
My last girlfriend was a pathologist and did her undergrad at MIT. She had a chance to interview him and he talked about her tits...
James Watson was a douche.