Cancelled yet important

Cancel Culture continued
By Alex Ness
November 10, 2025

James D. Watson, April 1928- November 2025, Co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, for co-discovering the importance, puzzling, future changing enigma of DNA died. Although he obviously didn't discover alone all that he then shared with human society, he chose to present his discovery, as his and his alone work. He had not been honest in that, his partners in research were offended by his behavior. But he wasn't done offending people yet.

For example, to contrast this scientific mind with Galileo, who I'd just written about. Galileo's discoveries in the field of astronomy were world changing, but he was forcibly made to recant such immense new knowledge by the Pope and suffer in home arrest. He was correct, and made his views known and was then canceled by the all powerful Catholic church. 

But Watson was not a thinker who was broken and corrected and punished. In fact, he had reached a point where he obviously seemed to feel free to speak all his dirty other ideas and beliefs in public. He treated women as lesser colleagues. He felt that discoveries in human anatomy and culture, with DNA as part of an overall study, that some humans were different, as determined by birth, race, geographical beginnings, and IQ. That is, his views were that science revealed why some people can't succeed, and that science predicted the difference in results. 

He was uninvited from numerous societies, universities who'd honored him with honorary degrees removed the honors, and far more. Unlike Galileo who was canceled due to being correct about a fact that the church found unsettling, Watson was only canceled in how the world looked at him. That he was intelligent to a high degree wasn't at issue. No it wasn't his IQ, it was his wisdom that was wanting.

Were his views about DNA important? Yes. Could anyone else have found what he did? Eventually almost surely. But we aren't talking about results from running in a race or some sport. His discoveries led to much of the wild and powerful changes in medicine and future science, that will perhaps cure cancer, by seeing DNA has weaknesses or proclivities. There are diseases that when unchecked make humans vulnerable, but these, with gene editing might be wiped out. But Watson chose to see that DNA determines your intelligence, and that some humans are weak due to them being from different places.

Unlike many who hate him, I am not celebrating his death. I am simply saying, some are canceled for being right but at the wrong time. He was canceled after achieving great things, not for his discoveries, for his wisdom and ignorance leading him to speak out upon unproven and almost certainly wrong views, due to racism. Some mavericks of public opinion are seen later, much later even, as heroic. Watson will not be proven heroic for speaking out, except among racists and racialists.

So we've seen cancellation over the message behind the expression of art, or discovery of new intellectual facts, and now, a cancellation over the person using his perception of his own importance, becoming canceled due to his ugly views upon humanity. Rightly so for Watson. 

Why am I moved by the subject of cancellation? It certainly isn't because I think it might happen to me.  I am old and nothing I say is new. But along with societal weakness, humans are all different, and diversity, now an unpopular term, allows human society to express itself, for good or ill, and it occasionally catches the innocent, by misinterpretation, and the catches those foolish to think they are invulnerable, due to their supposedly flawless intellect.

We might all be subject to blame, insult, insults to our character or allegations of idiocy. But so far, Ovid and Galileo were right, Pound was wrong, and Watson was more than wrong, he invited the consequences of his poorly considered speech.