The root of reckon is “count,” and to ask what to make of a life like Watson’s risks suggesting that the triumphs and sins of a human life can be quantified on the same numerical scale. How many racist comments must be subtracted from a Nature paper before the total is negative? Of course, human lives defy this type of mathematical flattening. We can add three and two to make five, but we cannot add scientific breakthroughs to bigotry and arrive at a tidy, incontrovertible sum. One deed sits stubbornly beside the other.
This complexity is particularly maddening in a scientist like Watson. He was a transformative leader in his field: He revitalized the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory into a scientific powerhouse, and he was instrumental in the initiation of the Human Genome Project. He also regularly acted with, as Cornelia Dean wrote in his New York Times obituary, “brash, unpleasant and even bigoted outspokenness,” making pseudoscientific assertions that led to his becoming, as Stat News put it, a “pariah” among his peers, forced into early retirement and stripped of honorary titles. Instead of seeing in our DNA evidence of how deeply interconnected we are—all part of the same family tree, all part of the same tree of life—Watson saw, or thought he saw, evidence only of fundamental difference.
As psychologists who study how genes influence human behavior—and, just as crucially, the limits of that influence—we cannot help but wonder how these strands of his intellect and character came to co-exist. Part of the problem might have been how a certain sort of scientific thinking can be fetishized. There’s a danger in slipping between different conceptions of “reason.” The analytic problem-solving skills that are selected for and honed in a scientific career are not synonymous with sound moral reasoning. Watson made his biggest scientific discovery as a young man, only 25 years old, and his sense of his own abilities, his own specialness, seemed never to mature beyond a young man’s bravado. It’s morally perilous to assume that you are always the smartest person in the room, and that the specific ways in which you are smart are always the surest paths to wisdom.