“And Yet, It Moves.”

Nancy Hopkins, Jennifer Doudna, and Walter Isaacson on the late James D. Watson.

From Nature:

Colleagues who were close to Watson have long had to wrestle with his mixed legacy. Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that Watson convinced her to pursue her PhD, at a time when few women pursued careers in science. When she launched her own lab and feared she might not get tenure, Watson convinced her to push on. “Just keep working and when you come up for tenure, if the letters are good enough, you’ll get tenure. Or I’ll sue them,” Hopkins says Watson told her.

Hopkins later became a vocal advocate for women in science and says that she is just one of many women Watson trained and supported. She also says she is bewildered by Watson’s rhetoric on race.

A 2001 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, left many in the audience stunned when Watson made remarks linking skin colour to sexual libido, and thinness to ambition.

After all, whoever linked thinness to ambition before, other than Julius Caesar in Shakespeare?

“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous”

Back to Nature:

“That was the beginning of the end,” Hopkins says of the lecture. “What happened later on, I just don’t know the answer.”

In 2007, Watson abandoned a book tour after asserting that he thought Black people are less intelligent than white people.

Granted, as Watson factually noted, “all our tests say” that black people are less intelligent on average than white people. But why would Nature not capitalize “white people” if The Science hadn’t proven they were genetically inferior to “Black people?”

By the way, if the name “Nancy Hopkins” is familiar, it’s because she launched the Larry Summers whoop-tee-doo in 2005 that kicked off the Cancel Culture Era. From the Boston Globe in 2005:

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, sparked an uproar at an academic conference Friday when he said that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. Summers also questioned how much of a role discrimination plays in the dearth of female professors in science and engineering at elite universities.

Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, walked out on Summers’ talk, saying later that if she hadn’t left, ‘’I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.” Five other participants reached by the Globe, including Denice D. Denton, chancellor designate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, also said they were deeply offended, while four other attendees said they were not.

Summers said he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own judgments -- in fact, he said, more research needs to be done on these issues. The organizer of the conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.

However, the problem of women in academia is one that Summers is confronting in his role as university president. The percentage of tenured job offers made to women by the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has dropped dramatically since Summers took office, prompting vigorous complaints from many of Harvard’s senior female professors...

He offered three possible explanations, in declining order of importance, for the small number of women in high-level positions in science and engineering. The first was the reluctance or inability of women who have children to work 80-hour weeks.

The second point was that fewer girls than boys have top scores on science and math tests in late high school years. ‘’I said no one really understands why this is, and it’s an area of ferment in social science,” Summers said in an interview Saturday. ‘’Research in behavioral genetics is showing that things people previously attributed to socialization weren’t” due to socialization after all...

In his talk, according to several participants, Summers also used as an example one of his daughters, who as a child was given two trucks in an effort at gender-neutral parenting. Yet she treated them almost like dolls, naming one of them ‘’daddy truck,” and one ‘’baby truck.”

It was during his comments on ability that Hopkins, sitting only 10 feet from Summers, closed her computer, put on her coat, and walked out. ‘’It is so upsetting that all these brilliant young women [at Harvard] are being led by a man who views them this way,” she said later in an interview.

Hopkins was the main force behind an influential study documenting inequalities for women at MIT, which led that school’s former president, Charles M. Vest, to acknowledge the pattern of bias in 1999...

Hopkins got herself higher pay out of this, so you can totally trust her findings as disinterested.

Summers’ third point was about discrimination. Referencing a well-known concept in economics, he said that if discrimination was the main factor limiting the advancement of women in science and engineering, then a school that does not discriminate would gain an advantage by hiring away the top women who were discriminated against elsewhere.

Because that doesn’t seem to be a widespread phenomenon, Summers said, ‘’the real issue is the overall size of the pool, and it’s less clear how much the size of the pool was held down by discrimination.”

This is a classic example of Helen Andrews’ observation of the feminization of organizations.

Paywall here.