A pioneering biologist is reprimanded for unscientific, offensive views

JAMES WATSONDNA, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of , has never deemed it necessary to hold in what he thinks, no matter how controversial. It would be acceptable to abort a fetus, he has said, if it carried genes that might mean the resulting adult was gay. He has suggested there is a link between sunlight and libido, once telling a lecture hall that this explains why there are “Latin lovers” but only “English patients”. Women in laboratories made it more fun for the men, he said, but they are probably less effective than the men.These dubious statements have not prevented Dr Watson, who delights in being a free thinker and , from holding the position among the world’s scientific elite that he and Crick acquired when they published their historic discovery in 1953, when he was just 25. Now, at the age of 90, he may, at last, have lost it.