James Watson is nearly 80 and looks it — his skin is dotted with liver spots, a shock of wispy white hair (half) covers his head, wrinkles surround his blue eyes, and his teeth… Well, don't get me started on his teeth. But it's the Chicago-born Nobel laureate's ideas, not his physical appearance, that age him the most. Lauded almost 50 years ago for determining, with the help of an unrewarded female researcher named Rosalind Franklin and others, the structure of DNA, it seems like his mission since has been to sully his notable scientific works with off-color comments.

From CNN:

In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

During a lecture tour in 2000, he suggested there might be links between skin color and sexual prowess and between a person's weight and their level of ambition.

And in a British TV documentary that aired in 2003, Watson suggested that stupidity was a genetic disease that should be treated.

Watson's latest comments, about a link between race and intelligence, may have destroyed his reputation in the scientific community and his legacy for good. Stereohyped spoke to Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Dean of University Studies at North Carolina A&T University and the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America about James Watson, scientific racism, and the need for more scientific literacy.

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