I dislike this project where we venerate folks who made one major contribution. The scientists in my field that I respect the most are the ones who followed their early work up, both with further strong (additional) scientific contributions, and/or (as they moved out of the active phase of their scientific careers) with good mentoring and policy contributions.

It looks like Watson did some of the latter, then did his best to reverse all of his work:

  “I really don’t know what happened to Jim,” said biologist Nancy Hopkins of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who in the 1990s led the campaign to get MIT to recognize its discrimination against women faculty. “At a time when almost no men supported women, he insisted I get a Ph.D. and made it possible for me to do so,” she told STAT in 2018. But after 40 years of friendship, Watson turned on her after she blasted the claim by then-Harvard University president Lawrence Summers in 2005 that innate, biological factors kept women from reaching the pinnacle of science.

  “He demanded I apologize to Summers,” Hopkins said of Watson. (She declined.) “Jim now holds the view that women can’t be great at anything,” and certainly not science. “He has adopted these outrageous positions as a new badge of honor, [embracing] political incorrectness.”

Where would science be today if we cast aside every uncomfortable hypothesis?