Titel: “All in the Genes: Reflections on DNA, Intelligence, Race, and the Fall of James Watson”

Beginn: 25.6.2019, 17:00 -18:30 Uhr

Veranstaltungsort:
HS 55 University Medical Centre

Referenten: Prof. Nathaniel Comfort, Johns Hopkins University

Kurzbeschreibung: At the turn of the millennium, James Watson was the most famous living scientist. He is a co-discoverer of the DNA double helix in 1953, Nobel laureate, and pioneer of molecular biology. In the 1960s he had remade a decrepit, near-bankrupt marine station on New York’s Long Island—and the former headquarters of the American Progressive-era eugenics movement—into a gleaming global center for DNA science. He frequently grabbed headlines, due to his increasingly retrograde views on race, gender, and ability, combined with a loose tongue, hot temper, and knack for the attention-getting phrase. In the late 1980s, he played a major role in launching the Human Genome Project, and in 2007, he became the first individual person to have his genome sequenced. A few months later, he torched his reputation by explicitly claiming that black people are innately less intelligent than whites. The science he claimed supported his views was weak, misguided, wrong, old. But Watson’s prominence seemed to put the weight of science behind bigoted views on race. In early 2019, he refused to take back or apologize for those 2007 remarks, and indeed reiterated them. Instantly, he became an utter pariah within science—and a hero to white supremacists. Today, Watson is better known for being a racist than for DNA.

Nathaniel Comfort will argue that positioning Watson within the longue durée history of race science reveals continuities that help us understand how race science so often props up race prejudice. And by situating him in the current social context of our time, we can examine some of the specific risks of scientific racism today. What makes science so congenial to racist thought? Why do some scientists stop thinking rigorously when it comes to race? Is an anti-racist science of human genomes possible? Watson’s example, I think, suggests some answers.

Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins and a past Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress and NASA. He writes widely on the history and ethics of genetics. He is the author of The Tangled Field, a biographical study of the eccentric, brilliant geneticist, Barbara McClintock, and The Science of Human Perfection, a history of eugenics and medical genetics. In addition to scholarly work, he engages in contemporary debates about the meanings of genomics and reproductive technologies in today's society. He has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Aeon, New York Times, among others, and has appeared on American public television and radio. He is currently working on a biography of the controversial DNA pioneer James Watson.

Kontakt: Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin
Universitätsmedizin Göttingen
Humboldtallee 36
D-37073 Göttingen
http://www.egmed.uni-goettingen.de/