Nobel laureate in race row

 
Published: Thursday 15 November 2007

Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Dewey Watson has attracted a lot of flak for claiming that black people are inherently less intelligent than whites.

In an interview to the Sunday Times, Watson, who in the 1950s helped identify dna, declared himself to be "gloomy about the prospect of Africa ... all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-- whereas all the testing says not really". Human rights groups and fellow scientists immediately expressed outrage. Steven Rose, a brain specialist and professor of biological sciences at the Open University, Milton Keynes uk said that, "This is Watson at his most scandalous. I have heard him say similar things about women, but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain." Watson who has been hailed as one of the greatest living scientists, apologized, but he was relieved of his duties at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the Long Island, usa .Watson's presentation in the Science Museum, London, was also cancelled with uk's minister for skills David Lammy saying that the scientist's views could only help the far right.

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