THE great scientist James Watson told the Financial Times this week that he is auctioning his Nobel Prize medal.
Watson says that following accusations of racism in 2007, “no one really wants to admit I exist,” and as a result his income had plummeted and he has become an ‘unperson’.
The medal is expected to fetch anything between US$2 million to US$3,5 million.
James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, Linus Pauling and Francis Crick.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.”
Watson had a long illustrious history which saw him working from 1956 to 1976, at faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology. 
From 1968 he served as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, New York, greatly expanding its level of funding and research. At CSHL, he shifted his research emphasis to the study of cancer, along with making it a world leading research centre in molecular biology.
In 1994, he started as president and served for 10 years.
He was then appointed chancellor, serving until 2007 when he resigned his position after making controversial comments claiming a link between intelligence and geographical ancestry.  
Between 1988 and 1992, Watson was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project.
Watson has often expressed provocative concepts and disparaging opinions of others within the realm of genetic research.
He has been quoted in The Sunday Telegraph, 1997, as stating: “If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn’t want a homosexual child, well, let her.”
On the issue of obesity, Watson has also been quoted as saying in 2000: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.”
While speaking at a conference in 2000, Watson had suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, hypothesising that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos.  
His lecture argued that extracts of melanin — which gives skin its colour — had been found to boost subjects’ sex drive.
“That’s why you have Latin lovers,” he said, according to people who attended the lecture.
“You’ve never heard of an English lover.
“Only an English patient.” 
Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the ‘really stupid’ bottom 10 percent of people should be cured. 
He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty.
“I think it would be great.”
In March 2013 Watson, who is partly Irish himself, made offhanded remarks about Irish people, stating that “(the) historic curse of the Irish, which is not alcohol, it’s not stupidity.
“But it’s ignorance.”
In early October 2007, Watson was about to embark on a UK book tour to promote the memoir.
He was interviewed by Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe at CSHL.
In 1996 she had been a student there in a programme in which Watson recruited students to live at his family home and work at CSHL for a year.
Hunt-Grubbe had gone on to work for the Sunday Times Magazine; she was selected for the interview as she was one of the few women to have been mentored by him.
Hunt-Grubbe broached the subject of race and intelligence.
A transcript of that part of the interview reads: “He says that 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,” and I know that this ‘hot potato’ is going to be difficult to address.
His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because, “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level.”
He writes that “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.
Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so. 
Watson’s comments drew attention and criticism in the UK.
Watson said his intention was to promote science not racism, but some of the UK venues cancelled his appearances. 
Watson cancelled the rest of his tour.
Because of the public controversy, on October 18 2007 the Board of Trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended Watson’s administrative responsibilities.
On October 19, Watson issued an apology; on October 25, he resigned from his position as chancellor. 
In 2008, Watson was appointed chancellor emeritus of CSHL. 
As of 2009, he continues to advise and guide project work at the laboratory.
In a 2008 BBC documentary, Watson said: “I have never thought of myself as a racist.
“I don’t see myself as a racist.
“I am mortified by it.
“It was the worst thing in my life”.
The thing about racism in America is that Watson committed the cardinal sin — expressing his views in public about black people.
We are after all a colour-blind society and one is not defined by the colour of their skin, but by their potential.
Interestingly the same society and media that has ostracised Watson is the very one that continues to reinforce the notion that all black men are criminals, drug dealers, and should be in prison, while the women are characterised as loud, with having children with several men, and only fit to work menial jobs if they are not on welfare.
It is alright for the police to shoot, kill and harass the black man because ‘obviously they are criminals’.
It is alright for the judicial system to mete out heavier and harsher sentences to blacks because the system needs to send a message to other blacks out there that their behaviour will not be tolerated.
However, an 80 something year-old man who is a relic of an era where blacks were nothing more, but second class, suddenly says what his society secretly holds to be true, then it is all outrage.
The truth of the matter is that, America has a long way to go when it comes to race relations.
Until the black child can have the same opportunities as their white counterpart, we might speak of being colour-blind, but it is the black man who gets profiled by the police on the intersection, it is the black child who gets gunned down by the police on our streets and it is the black young adult whose future remains bleak due to learning in deteriorated schools.