>But one thing we need to consider is that he is old. Really, he is 86. Of course this shouldn't shield him from criticism, but he was born and lived in a different world than ours. Bad behavior should be called out and shunned, but there's a fine line between this and marginalization. We should all be responsible about it.

Some might call this marginalization, but you could equally consider Watson's comments to be indicative that the grand old man of genetics is no longer really doing modern, functional science, and it's not the business of Cold Spring Harbor, or any other research lab, to subsidize someone making non-scientific and inflammatory comments because they were once good researchers.