Science group condemns Nobel laureate’s ‘racist’ remarks

A leading scientific organization Thursday condemned as “racist” and “vicious” remarks by a Nobel Prize-winning US scientist who reportedly said black people are less intelligent than whites.

The Washington-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said it was “outraged” by the remarks attributed to James Watson that appeared in Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine at the weekend.

Watson won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1962 for his part in discovering the structure of DNA.

The 79-year-old chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state is in Britain to promote his new book “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From A Life In Science.”

Watson told the Sunday Times he was “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.” AFP