Watson, DNA Discoverer, Retires After Race Remark James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA's molecular structure, retired as chancellor of New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks.
The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a book tour. Watson announced his decision to retire and leave the lab's board in an e-mail.
``Closer now to 80 than 79, the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue,'' Watson said in the e-mail. ``The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.''
Watson was quoted Oct. 14 in the Times of London saying 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.''
Watson apologized in a speech to a private audience at the Royal Society in London, said Kate Farquhar-Thomson, a spokeswoman for Oxford University Press. Watson said the controversy over his remarks has focused him on the moral values passed on to him by his mother and father.
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