KEY POINTS:
It should have been an evening of quiet, contemplative pleasure. In one of the more elegant rooms of the Royal Society, Jim Watson had gathered a few friends and a handful of journalists to celebrate the launch of his latest book, Avoid Boring People.
Watson was anything but
happy, however. Indeed, according to most people at the event, he looked completely shattered. The scientist who, with Francis Crick, had discovered the structure of DNA and revolutionised modern biology, and who is revered as one of the greatest scientists of his day, was shaking badly.
He rambled, paused and then rambled again as he talked to friends. Finally, he produced a statement and began reading it .
He could only apologise "unreservedly", the statement said, for his assertion that he thought black people were less intelligent than white. "This is not what I meant."
Then Watson hesitated, returned to his script and finally wandered off his topic completely to end up describing the San bushmen of Botswana. "It was a tragic sight," said one guest.
It is not hard to understand why Watson was so distraught.
His remark had attracted a fusillade of abuse from scientists, politicians and equality campaigners. The Science Museum cancelled a sell-out meeting it had planned to hold to honour 79-year-old Watson on the grounds that his remarks had gone "beyond the point of acceptable debate". Several other centres scheduled to host his talks followed suit.
After the Royal Society meeting, Watson and his wife returned to their hotel where they learned that his employers, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, had disowned his remarks. The next morning, it emerged the laboratory had also suspended Watson as its chancellor.
Enough was enough, the scientist said: "I am going home to try to save my job." His efforts failed and on Thursday he resigned
As a tale of intellectual hubris, it is hard to beat.
But the fall of Jim Watson goes beyond mere personal tragedy. It also raises key issues. The first is simple: is there any evidence there are major differences in the intellectual potential of races? The second is more complex: how should people react when a scientist of Watson's standing makes such provocative remarks?
Most scientists have quickly jumped into the furore to dismantle the idea that significant intellectual differences exist between Africans and others. "Defining intelligence is complex and there are many forms of intelligence, not all of which are captured by IQ tests," said the Oxford neurologist Colin Blakemore. "In any case, it would be as unethical to organise society around some numerical indicator of difference as it would to do so on the basis of skin colour."
Other scientists point out that our species is so young - Homo sapiens emerged from its African homeland only 100,000 years ago - that it simply has not had time to evolve any significant differences in intellectual capacity as its various groups of people have spread round the globe. Only the most superficial differences - notably skin colour - separate the world's different population groupings.
Underneath that skin, people are remarkably alike.
This argument does not reject the idea that notable variations in intellect exist between individuals, but it stresses that these differences exist within racial groups, not between them. Judging a man or woman by the colour of their skin will get you nowhere, in other words. As Craig Venter, who pioneered much of the US' work in decoding the human genome, put it: "There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human gene code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive of intelligence."
The second issue raised by his claims is far more vexed. How should we react to claims such as those made by Watson? Several politicians urged he should be silenced on the grounds that his views would only give succour to the racist fringe - as indeed they have. Certainly, Watson was extraordinarily naive. But was it right to cancel public meetings at which he could be called to account for his views?
Senior staff at the Science Museum in London clearly thought so, as they did at the Bristol Cultural Development Department Partnership, which was set to host a public meeting with Watson. They, too, decided not to hold their meeting on the grounds that the scientist's views were "unacceptably provocative".
Not every centre scheduled to host public meetings with Watson took this view, however. The Centre for Life in Newcastle said it would go ahead with its meeting as it would provide the public with the chance to question the scientist and then make up its own mind about his claims. "We had some calls expressing misgivings about our decision to welcome Watson, but most people supported us. We were going to give him a robust but fair hearing and let people decide for themselves," said a spokesman.
In the end, Watson decided to return home, so no meetings occurred - a move that has dismayed many scientists who believed it was vital Watson confront his critics and his public. "What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant 'thought police', of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe out of the laboratory that he has devoted much of his life to, building up a world-class reputation," said Richard Dawkins, who had been due to conduct a public interview with Watson.
Dawkins' stance was supported by Blakemore. "Jim Watson is well-known for being provocative and politically incorrect. But it would be a sad world if such a distinguished scientist was silenced because of his more unpalatable views."
This last remark goes to the heart of the issue. Watson is renowned for his controversial views. He sees himself as a free-thinker, though it must be admitted his ideas often simply seem eccentric. In 1997, he suggested it would be acceptable to terminate a foetus if it carried a gene that might mean the adult that grows from it was gay. He has also suggested a link between sunlight and libido. "That is why you have Latin lovers. You've never heard of an English lover," he said. And Watson has also proposed that a foetus destined to be "stupid" should be aborted.
Such maverick remarks led the journal Science to conclude, in 1990, that "to many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script".
But while it is obvious that the scientist holds some fairly illiberal views on certain issues, it is also clear he has acted in a courageous, progressive manner on other issues. When he was director of the human genome project, he fought bitterly to prevent the US Government from adopting a policy that would allow it to patent human genetic material discovered by project scientists in order to exploit them as sources of new drugs and medicines. The idea was "lunacy", said Watson, the equivalent of applying for ownership of the laws of nature. When he realised he was losing, he handed in his resignation.
Nor is it at all clear that Watson is a racist, a point stressed last week by the Pulitzer-winning biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard University.
In his autobiography, Naturalist, Wilson described Watson, fresh from Nobel success, arriving at Harvard's biology department and "radiating contempt" for the rest of the staff. He was "the most unpleasant human being I had ever met", Wilson recalled.
"Having risen to fame at an early age, [he] became the Caligula of biology. He was given licence to say anything that came into his mind and expected to be taken seriously. And unfortunately he did so, with casual and brutal offhandedness."
That is a fairly grim description. However, there is a twist. There has been a rapprochement. "We have become firm friends," Wilson told The Observer. "Today we are the two grand old men of biology in America and get on really well. I certainly don't see him as a Caligula figure any more. I have come to see him as a very intelligent, straight, honest individual. Of course, he would never get a job as a diplomat in the State Department. He is just too outspoken. But one thing I am absolutely sure of is that he is not a racist. I am shocked at what has happened"
But this time he had gone too far. On Thursday he said in an email yesterday that he was retiring.
"Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue," he wrote in a message to the laboratory's board. "The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired." His reputation as a brilliant, radical thinker has been transformed and the stain on his career is unlikely to be washed clean.
- Observer
The ruining of a prize reputation
* October 14: The Sunday Times Magazine publishes an interview with Dr James Watson. He says he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
His hope is that everyone is equal but says that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
* October 17: The front page of the Independent runs a story on Watson's theory with the headline, "Africans are less intelligent than Westerners, says DNA pioneer". It creates a furore.
* October 18: The British Science Museum cancels Watson's talk planned for October 19.
It says: "James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate."
At a launch for his book at the Royal Society in London, Watson withdraws the words attributed to him: "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly."
* October 19: Watson seeks to justify his theory that there is a genetic basis behind differences in IQ in an interview with the Independent.
* October 20: Watson is forced to return to New York after his employers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, suspend him.
* October 25 : He resigns from his post.
CV: James Dewey Watson
Born in Chicago, Illinois, on April 6, 1928, James Watson was a precocious child who gained a place at Chicago University at 15.
He graduated with a zoology degree in 1947.
In October 1951, he arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, to carry out genetics research and met Francis Crick.
They struck up a friendship that became one of the most famous partnerships in science and led them, in 1953, to the discovery that DNA, from which human genes are made, has a double helix structure.
In 1962, the pair - with Maurice Wilkins, of King's College London - were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work.
Six years later, Watson published his account of the DNA story in The Double Helix. Dropped by its original publisher amid objections by Crick, Wilkins and others, its opening sentence was: "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood." It became a bestseller.
In 1988, Watson was made head of the US Human Genome Project. Four years later, he resigned over US plans to try to take out patents on gene sequences discovered by US scientists, saying: "The human genome belongs to the world's people."
He was suspended last week and then resigned as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island.
