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James D. Watson

64 quotes

“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Watson: But legalities aside, I think we must reevaluate our basic assumptions about the meaning of life. Perhaps, as my former colleague Francis Crick suggested, no one should be thought alive until about three days after birth.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Prism: But how would society react to such a proposal?”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Foreword for Discovering the Brain (1992) by Sandra Ackerman, p. iii; often paraphrased: "The brain is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.
“There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Lifelines (1997) by Steven Rose
“Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: All for the Good: Why genetic engineering must soldier on" TIME magazine, Vol. 153, No. 1 (11 January 1999)
“To have success in science, you need some luck. But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And it's not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To succeed in science, you have to avoid dumb people (here I was still following Luria's example). Now that might sound inexcusably flip, but the fact is that you must always turn to people who are brighter than yourself.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To make a huge success, a scientist must be prepared to get into deep trouble. Sometime or another, someone will tell you that you are not ready to do something. … If you are going to make a big jump in science, you will very likely be unqualified to succeed by definition. The truth, however, won't save you from criticism. Your very willingness to take on a very big goal will offend some people who will think that you are too big for your britches and crazy to boot.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Be sure you have someone up your sleeve who will save you when you find yourself in deep s—.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I'm not good enough to do something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to do something that I like. … Constantly exposing your ideas to informed criticism is very important, and I would venture to say that one reason both of our chief competitors failed to reach the Double Helix before us was that each was effectively very isolated.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Nobel Winner's Theories Raise Uproar in Berkeley", by Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle (13 November 2000)
“No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Risky Genetic Fantasies" in The Los Angeles Times (29 July 2001), p. M4
“If we don't play God, who will?”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities (1996)
“I just can’t sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it’s nonsense.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Scientific American Vol. 288, Issue 4 (2003), p. 54
“People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer", by Shaoni Bhattacharya, New Scientist (28 February 2003).
“Never be the brightest person in the room. … We're all imperfect.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: James Watson: How we discovered DNA, TED talk (February 2005)
“Science Ph.D. students have effectively become serfs. And who would become a serf when you can work for Goldman Sachs and get paid $300,000 a year to become a serf? Why drive a Chevy when you can drive a BMW — and now you're condemned to driving a car from Malaysia or something. Life should be fun.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dr. James Watson Follows His Own Advice" in Seattlest (28 September 2007)
“New ideas require new facts. You explain things by way of ideas. Why do we have a government that is run by rich trash? Because they've used their money to buy the presidency. Bush is a tool for the people who don't want an inheritance tax.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified. Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous. The whole Larry Summers thing, to say that men are a bit strange and their strangest quality is their ability to understand mathematics -- you're not supposed to even think it.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you could make people with ten-point-higher IQs, we'd probably have fewer wars.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've seen no evidence of a god, so I'm not going to think about one. Being raised nonreligious made you free. You could look at the evidence. Whether being nonreligious or a Democrat was more important, I can't tell you.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since 1978, when a pail of water was dumped over my Harvard friend E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence human behaviour, the assault against human behavioural genetics by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But irrationality must soon recede. It will soon be possible to read individual genetic messages at costs which will not bankrupt our health systems. In so doing, I hope we see whether changes in DNA sequence, not environmental influences, result in behaviour differences. Finally, we should be able to establish the relative importance of nature as opposed to nurture.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thought that some people are innately wicked disturbs me. But science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding. In finding out the extent to which genes influence moral behaviour, we shall also be able to understand how genes influence intellectual capacities.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one really wants to admit I exist.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On reactions to statements indicating differences of intelligence or perception levels in various human populations have genetic factors, widely perceived as racist, as quoted in "James Watson to sell Nobel Prize medal"…
“Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1 January 2019
“Crick, however, was right. Our discovery put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answer that question with a definitive No.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is why the double helix was so important. It brought the Enlightenment revolution in materialistic thinking into the cell. The intellectual journey that had begun with Copernicus displacing humans from the center of the universe and continued with Darwin’s insistence that humans are merely modified monkeys had finally focused in on the very essence of life. And there was nothing special about it. The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The discovery of the double helix sounded the death knell for vitalism. Serious scientists, even those religiously inclined, realized that a complete understanding of life would not require the revelation of new laws of nature. Life was just a matter of physics and chemistry, albeit exquisitely organized physics and chemistry. The immediate task ahead would be to figure out how the DNA-encoded script of life went about its work.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The opposition to GM foods is largely a sociopolitical movement whose arguments, though couched in the language of science, are typically unscientific. Indeed, some of the anti-GM pseudoscience propagated by the media—whether in the interests of sensationalism or out of misguided but well-intentioned concern—would be actually amusing were it not evident that such gibberish is in fact an effective weapon in the propaganda war.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sure enough, the notion of decoding their personal DNA appealed to more than a few well-off individuals, even if it amounted to the scientific equivalent of purchasing a vanity license plate.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Khan analyzed the data and was relieved to find that his son’s DNA was “pretty boring.” In the brave new world of personal genomics, “boring” is the new “great.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This remarkable feat merely reaffirms what most of us in molecular biology have long known to be the truth: the essence of life is complicated chemistry and nothing more.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conclusion that we nearly all carry components of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, although perhaps a blow to our collective ego, does not appear quite so surprising upon reflection. Indeed, the overall lesson of molecular studies of human evolution is just how astonishingly close we are genetically to the rest of the natural world. In fact, molecular data have often challenged (and overthrown) long-held assumptions about human origins.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Given what a powerful determinant, mostly for ill, skin color has been in human history and individual experience, it is surprising how little we know about its underlying genetics. This deficit, however, may have had less to do with the limitations of our science and more with the intrusion of politics into science; in an academic world terrorized by political correctness, even to study the molecular basis of such a characteristic has been something of a taboo.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The law has always had difficulty assimilating the implications, if not the very idea, of scientific evidence. Even the most intelligent lawyers, judges, and juries have customarily found it difficult to understand at first.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so having signed on to the liberal end of the political spectrum, and finding themselves in a climate intolerant of truths that don’t conform to ideology, most scientists carefully steer clear of research that might uncover such truths. The fact that they duly hew to the prevailing line of liberal orthodoxy—which seeks to honor and entitle difference while shunning any consideration of its biochemical basis—is, I think, bad for science, for a democratic society, and ultimately for human welfare.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Knowledge, even that which may unsettle us, it surely to be preferred to ignorance, however blissful in the short term the latter may be. All too often, however, political anxiousness favors ignorance and its apparent safety: we had better not learn about the genetics of skin color, goes the unspoken fear, lest such information be marshaled somehow by hatemongers opposed to mixing among the races.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tendency is to focus on the worst-case scenario and to shy away from potentially controversial science; it is time, I think, we looked instead at the benefits.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideology—of any kind—and science are at best inappropriate bedfellows. Science may indeed uncover unpleasant truths, but the critical thing is that they are truths. Any effort, whether wicked or well-meaning, to conceal truth or impede its disclosure is destructive. Too often in our free society, scientists willing to take on questions with political ramifications have been made to pay an unjust price.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Murray and Herrnstein’s assertion, however, was that the discrepancy was so great that environment likely couldn’t explain it all. Similarly, environmental factors alone may not account for why, globally, Asians have on average higher IQs than other racial groups. The idea of measurable variations in average intelligence among ethnic groups is not one, I admit, I want to live with. But though The Bell Curve’s claims remain questionable, we should not allow political anxieties to keep us from looking into them further.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The finding that there is a substantial genetic component to our behavior should not surprise us; indeed, it would be far more surprising if this were not the case. We are products of evolution: among our ancestors, natural selection indubitably exerted a strong influence over all traits that have figured in our survival.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The “secret” to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed—again, chemically—in our DNA.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If, therefore, we are serious about improving education, we cannot in good conscience ultimately limit ourselves to seeking remedies in nurture. My suspicion, however, is that education policies are too often set by politicians to whom the glib slogan “Leave no child behind” appeals precisely because it is so completely unobjectionable. But children will get left behind if we continue to insist that each one has the same potential for learning.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The issue, rather, is this: Are we prepared to embrace the undeniably vast potential of genetics to improve the human condition, individually and collectively? Most immediate, would we want the guidance of genetic information to design learning best suited to our children’s individual needs?”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I find such a moralistic response to be profoundly immoral.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so if there is a paramount ethical issue attending the vast new genetic knowledge created by the Human Genome Project, in my view it is the slow pace at which what we now know is being deployed to diminish human suffering. Leaving aside the uncertainties of gene therapy, I find the lag in embracing even the most unambiguous benefits to be utterly unconscionable. That in our medically advanced society almost no women are screened for the fragile X mutation two decades after its discovery can attest only to ignorance or intransigence.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors.”
James D. Watson (1928–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source