James Watson Credit: CSHL Archives/Bill Geddes

Nobel Laureate James Watson was keeping quiet last month after reportedly claiming in a lecture that dark-skinned people have a stronger libido than fair-skinned people and that fat people are unambitious.

The 72- year-old who, along with Francis Crick, is credited with working out the structure of DNA, provoked outrage among his audience at the University of California, Berkeley, to whom he also suggested that thin women are unhappy and showed pictures of model Kate Moss to illustrate his point. Some of the audience walked out.

Since the lecture, Watson has refused to give media interviews. A spokesman at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson is president, said he would discuss his work when he publishes a paper on the subject, probably this spring. The paper is expected to describe research on a gene, pom-C, which plays a role in the production of certain hormones. These include leptin, which influences fat metabolism and has been implicated in some depressive disorders, and melanin, the skin pigment. In his lecture, Watson reported the results of experiments in which men were injected with melanin and experienced increased sex drive. He argued that exposure to sunlight would increase melanin levels and produce a surge in libido.

Newspapers reported that Watson's lecture had opened a “transatlantic rift” after two British scientists, Susan Greenfield, president of the Royal Institution, and Lewis Wolpert, of University College, London, refused to condemn him just because his observations were politically incorrect. Wolpert told the Sunday Times in Britain, “One cannot censor reliable science because one does not like what it tells us.”

However, it was precisely Watson's apparent lack of reliable science that upset his critics in California. Susan Marqusee, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, told reporters, “there wasn't any science” to support the claims. Thomas Cline, professor of genetics at Berkeley, told Nature Medicine that Watson's remarks “communicated a lack of objectivity and rigor, not . . .characteristic of his previous work.” The anecdotal style was inappropriate for a scientific forum, he says. Cline stresses his own “total ignorance” of the research area and defended the right of any scientist to discuss valid ideas, but says that Watson provided no “believable science” to support his claims.

Watson's approach “puts molecular genetics in a bad light at a time when the subject is under assault on a number of fronts,” says Cline. “I was bothered by the failure of Watson to acknowledge that studies of subjects such as the relationship between skin color and libido. . .just like the relationship between race and IQ, are particularly likely to be misused by those who have unscientific axes to grind. It is for that reason that I believe one should abide by the highest scientific standards when dealing with such subjects.”

Wolpert, who was not present at Berkeley but who has heard Watson lecture on “something about sun and sex” in London at another event, similarly professed ignorance of the details of this research area. “The only thing I discuss with Watson is tennis,” he says.