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James Watson would have aborted his son if a genetic test had been available at the time warning that his child would be born with severe epilepsy. Declaring "I'm not a sadist", the man who co-discovered DNA said that parents, especially mothers, should have a right of genetic veto over the make-up of their child. "Any time you can prevent a seriously sick child from being born, it is good for everyone," Dr Watson told The Sunday Age. "Most mothers wouldn't want to have dwarfs." Dr Watson's views are based on a fierce libertarianism and personal experience. One of his...

James Watson would have aborted his son if a genetic test had been available at the time warning that his child would be born with severe epilepsy. Declaring "I'm not a sadist", the man who co-discovered DNA said that parents, especially mothers, should have a right of genetic veto over the make-up of their child. "Any time you can prevent a seriously sick child from being born, it is good for everyone," Dr Watson told The Sunday Age. "Most mothers wouldn't want to have dwarfs." Dr Watson's views are based on a fierce libertarianism and personal experience. One of his...

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the spiral, "double-helix" structure of DNA, paving the way for everything from DNA blood tests to genetically engineered tomatoes, has died. He was 88. Crick died Wednesday at University of California, San Diego, Thornton Hospital, according to Brendolyn Williams, a spokeswoman for the Salk Institute, the research body where Crick worked. Crick had been battling colon cancer. It was 1953, while working in Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, that the British-born Crick, 36 at the time, and the American-born Watson, just 24, struck upon the famous double-helix structure - like...

LONDON - London's Science Museum canceled a Friday talk by Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson after the co-discoverer of DNA's structure told a newspaper that Africans and Europeans had different levels of intelligence. James Watson provoked widespread outrage with his comments to The Sunday Times, which quoted the 79-year-old American as saying he was "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." He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: "people...

"...As the pendulum swings, public response has been telling. While there was vociferous outrage over James Watson’s views as expressed to The Times, few editorials have lined up in support of the realism of Neil Turok’s quest for the African Einstein. To be fair, the bar has been set quite high. Nevertheless, Turok’s aim squarely brings to the discussion forum the issue of universal Homo sapien cognitive capacity. Both Turok and Watson suggest that within our lifetimes in the next decade or so, scientific discoveries and technological measures will provide support for their divergent predictions. Who is correct? Richard Lynn...

The discoverer of the double-helix says the disease can be cured in his lifetime. He's 82. 'We should cure cancer," James Watson declares in a huff, and "we should have the courage to say that we can really do it." He adds a warning: "If we say we can't do it, we will create an atmosphere where we just let the FDA keep testing going so pitifully." The man who discovered the double helix and gave birth to the field of modern genetics is now 82 years old. But he's not close to done with his life's work. He wants...

Let’s suppose that James Watson, who co-discovered the structure of DNA together with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, is wrong about race and intelligence. And let’s even suppose that it was immoral for him to say that this fact “makes me despair about Africa.” Does this abolish Dr. Watson’s free speech rights? No. Well, does James Watson merit the merry media witch hunt that has followed him, ever after making that Verboten remark, so that he is now known as “the disgraced scientist James Watson”? I do not think so. Media witch hunting is a fundamental wrong, no matter who...

Russia's richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson's Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him. Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson "deserved" the medal, and that he was "distressed" the scientist had felt forced to sell it. The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction. The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient....

Russia's richest man has revealed that he bought US scientist James Watson's Nobel Prize gold medal, and intends to return it to him. Steel and telecoms tycoon Alisher Usmanov said Mr Watson "deserved" the medal, and that he was "distressed" the scientist had felt forced to sell it. The medal, awarded in 1962 for the discovery of the structure of DNA, sold for $4.8m (£3m) at auction. The medal was the first Nobel Prize to be put on sale by a living recipient. The 1962 prize was awarded to Watson, along with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick, with each receiving...

The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds. It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites. In 2007, Dr. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, told a British journalist that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that...

We marked last week the death at age 97 of James D. Watson (1928 – 2025), co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA. Reflecting on his life leads to contradictory responses: a hero of science, whose work led to insights pointing to life’s intelligent design, he was also a bigoted atheist and champion of pseudoscientific racism.The names Watson and Crick are almost as iconic as the DNA double helix that they elucidated in 1953, for which they won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Maurice Wilkins. One discovery led to another: Crick’s sequence hypothesis...

A phenomenon known as Black Fatigue is growing among many Americans who are tired of the rude and anti-social behavior in parts of black culture, and the unspoken privilege it creates. Among all the viral memes and online trends one sees while scrolling through social media, one term has been coming up more regularly: “black fatigue.” The term has been around since 2015, and appears to have originated from a board on a site that has become the Twilight Zone of the internet (a site that is “both shadow and substance, of things and ideas”), 4Chan. As with many post-modern...

According to various reports, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger introduced her euphemistic "Negro Project" on Sunday, June 25th, 1939, 87 years ago. And Black America has never been the same since. Key Takeaways: * Margaret Sanger's Negro Project — the targeting of Black Americans by eugenicists — could come to fruition in a relatively short period of time. * According to the Population Reference Bureau, dedicated to informing people around the world about the population, health and the environment, long periods of low fertility rates have an "irreversible consequence.” * The total fertility rate for Black women in 2023 is...

Judge Nicholas Rowland told the boys: 'None of you need to go to prison today.' He said the boys are 'very young', had low intelligence, a 'limited understanding of consent' and were susceptible to 'peer pressure'. The judge also praised the boys for their conduct during the trial, saying 'I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before. 'You have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial. (The second boy) and (the third boy) your problems are quite bad.'

In a shift from the past, more accused violent assailants have striking academic records. ‘We’re seeing a new breed of individual.’ An Ivy League grad. An aspiring engineer who scored 1530 out of 1600 on his SAT. A 4.0 high-school student with a prestigious college scholarship. And now, a Caltech grad.

Britain has failed white working-class boys, who remain the worst-performing group in England’s schools, Lord Sewell will tell Sir Keir Starmer this week. The Tory peer, the author of a report on race and ethnic disparities, will say the group is still stuck at the bottom of the class after successive governments ignored his warnings. In 2021, after the Black Lives Matter movement, Lord Sewell was asked by Boris Johnson to chair an inquiry by 10 commissioners, all but one of whom were from ethnic minorities. Their 250-page report said the biggest drivers of disparities were not race but class,...

The results were not what they wanted and are what’s going viral. As it turns out, those “Western circles” were right all along. According to the data they shared, the average score came in around 73, with a median just under 70. More than half of participants actually scored below 70. These are numbers that are way below the average.

A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests that the connection between a young adult’s cognitive ability and their future socioeconomic status is largely driven by their genes. The findings provide evidence that genetic factors play a larger role in educational and occupational success than environmental conditions. This underlying biology may help explain why some social interventions aimed at reducing inequality tend to fall short over the long term.

For the first time in recorded human history, scientists have discovered a generation they claim is actually less intelligent than the one that came before it. Neuroscientist Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, who previously worked as an educator, argues that people in Gen Z have become cognitively stunted as a result of their over-reliance on new technology, like smartphones. With records being kept on academic achievement for the past 200 years, this sudden decline from Millennials to Gen Zers was attributed to this rapid digital development, with Dr Horvath explaining before a Senate committee last month that this drop happened despite...

A chart for 2026 showing the average IQ of the nations.