Readers Defend Nobel Laureate's Opinions

James Watson's ideas on obesity, race, sex strikes chord with many

Tom Abate / SF Chronicle 11dec00

Some articles strike a responsive chord with readers, but occasionally it's a sour note.

Last month, I wrote about noted geneticist James Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize for unraveling the structure of DNA. I reported how he shocked a scientific audience at the University of California at Berkeley by making unsupported assertions about the supposed biochemical links between sex and skin color, fat and ambition.

Watson's thesis is that a chemical called pom-C breaks down into derivative enzymes that influence a series of behaviors.

One of the pom-C derivatives is melanin, which darkens the skin. Watson described an experiment in which melanin was found to have a Viagralike effect.

He contrasted slides of bikini-clad women with veiled Muslim women to suggest that sunlight stimulated sexual desire. At another point, he described how another pom-C derivative influenced the fat cycle, and suggested that heavier people have less ambition than thin people.

"Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad because you know you're not going to hire them," Watson said during a seminar on the UC Berkeley campus in October.

The Berkeley audience asked: What does any of this have to do with science?

I expected a strong reaction to the Nov. 13 front page story on Watson, whose stature has been likened to that of Charles Darwin. But I did not expect that a majority of responses would side with Watson and belittle his "politically correct" critics.

"These brats all need a good spanking," wrote Heidi Morero of San Jose, exhorting the Berkeley critics to "wake up and smell the coffee -- you are what you are, even if you're afraid to admit it."

Joe Guenter, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, wasn't surprised Watson had no evidence to back up his suggestions, adding that scientists must be free to advance theories far before they have the evidence.

"Even Einstein did not believe the results of his equations when they showed that the universe was expanding because there was no proof at the time showing the expansion," Guenter said.

Though Watson apologists were in the majority, I did receive some e-mail in support of the Berkeley critics. Susan Chaplin, a biology professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, said her class in advanced physiology discussed Watson's theories and judged them to be "spurious speculations based on absolutely no evidence."

Of course, Chaplin's students are hardly an impartial jury. They only heard Watson's theories as relayed by my own imperfect reporting.

Carol Landa of San Francisco took a whimsical view of Watson's argument that exposure to sunlight stimulated sexual desire.

"Perhaps Watson is a devotee of (Lord) Byron," she wrote, quoting from the poem, Don Juan: "What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, is much more common where the climate is sultry."

Kidding aside, I take it seriously when readers suggest I stifle views that don't jibe with my own. So let me explain why I still think Watson deserves a scolding for using his Nobel to advance hurtful generalizations that scarcely qualify as theories.

I do recognize Watson's contributions to science, even his refreshingly frank style. His personality leaps off the pages of "The Double Helix," the book in which he describes the competition to discover the structure of DNA. It's a wonderful story that pulls no punches in revealing the ambitious schemes by which he managed to beat Linus Pauling and other noted scientists to the most celebrated biological discovery of the century.

But there is a troubling hint of arrogance about Watson that comes between the lines of "The Double Helix." That arrogance was evident the first time I saw Watson in the flesh, during a March 1999 speech at UC Berkeley.

Watson was the featured speaker at an event held to commemorate the 25th anniversary of important discoveries in biotechnology -- the process for splicing together bits of DNA from different organisms.

More than a thousand people, including several other Nobel laureates, overflowed Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium and crammed into nearby classrooms, to hear Watson via closed-circuit TV.

And what did Watson do with this bully pulpit? He spent the first five minutes haranguing the projectionist, insisting that his first slide was not in focus and refusing to proceed until it was. This would never happen at his own institute, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, where the hired help was competent, Watson said.

And what was this visual? It was a picture of the cover of the scientific journal in which his first article on DNA appeared. It was a vanity that communicated nothing.

With this incident in the back of my head, I began to note instances in which Watson's behavior seemed of greater consequence.

Please understand that by dint of his discovery, coupled with his own personality, Watson used to wield something approaching a papal influence over molecular biology. It was Watson's prestige, for instance, that helped persuade Congress to launch the publicly funded Human Genome Project in 1990.

Once the project was under way, however, Watson enforced a certain orthodoxy over the gene mapping effort that, in retrospect, seems to have retarded its progress. Back when the Human Genome Project was getting started, a then-junior scientist named Craig Venter was experimenting with a machine- driven DNA discovery method that ran contrary to the prevailing scientific view about how the job should be done.

If Watson is the pope of DNA, then Venter is the Martin Luther of the genome. Venter, frustrated by his inability to get public funding for his heretical methods, quit the priesthood of publicly funded scientists and began a succession of gene-mapping efforts supported by investment capital.

In 1998, Venter launched Celera Corp. and boasted that his machines would map the genome years ahead of the public project. The public project, which was no longer run by Watson, responded by adopting Venter's methods. The result was a competition in which the two teams drove each other, creating the first draft of the human genome in June, years earlier than anyone had expected.

It is difficult to fault Watson for his early rejection of Venter's methods.

At the time, who could know his methods would work, and I can understand a certain reluctance to bet on Venter. Having met the guy on a couple of occasions, if I were choosing sides in a pickup basketball game, I'm not sure I'd want Venter. Those big elbows of his might make him awesome under the boards, but I wonder if he would ever pass the ball.

In any event, time seems to have eroded Watson's aura of infallibility in science's inner circle. That's what I took away from a recent conversation with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner, one of a handful of geneticists whose reputation rivals Watson's.

I was finishing an interview on a different story (see today's Science Page article on the Fugu), when Brenner said, unbidden, "When you called, I thought you were going to ask me about that Watson business."

Then, in a high-pitched voice, like a leprechaun stirring up trouble, Brenner told me how Watson had briefed scientists at San Diego's Salk Institute on the theories that prompted my story. Apparently, Brenner didn't think too highly of Watson's ruminations on sunlight, sex and fat. He said he could hardly believe Watson had gone public with his remarks.

"Someone faxed me a copy of the article. I thought it was rather funny," Brenner said. "If you discover the structure of DNA, you're allowed to say just about anything."

And so it should be. Watson's theories that biochemical activity may drive some behaviors disturb us because they may have a grain of truth. Shoot a person up with truth serum and they'll spill their guts. Ply a date with drinks and anything can happen. If chemicals we put into our bodies can influence behavior, surely gene-produced chemicals must also play a role.

But what role do the genes play? How much of behavior is under the control of our own will? These are questions that will occupy us for years to come as we learn more about our genes and wonder about their power.

I gave a voice to Watson's critics because I think he expressed the crudest form of genetic determinism.

We've been here before. After Darwin published his theory of evolution, it spawned concepts like "survival of the fittest," which were used as pseudo- scientific justifications for 19th century colonialism. I am afraid to think of the prejudices that will be inflamed by today's science.

At a time when we will all be struggling to put genetic discoveries into proper perspective, it's disappointing that Watson seems to have devolved into the shock jock of genetics instead of rising to be its elder statesman.