He takes on Eric Lander, and the scientific establishment. ‘This is who I am. I get angry.’
Michael Eisen was about to leave with his daughter for the Taylor Swift concert Saturday when someone flagged the offending news: Eric Lander, one of the most powerful men in American science, had toasted James Watson, a discoverer of DNA’s double helix, who has expressed racist and sexist views.
Eisen took to Twitter quickly and vociferously, declaring that Lander, the president of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, was “a deceitful megalomaniac who is destroying science” and who had offered “glowing support of misogynistic, anti-Semitic racists.”
He was only getting warmed up. Over the next 24 hours, Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, unleashed dozens of tweets that grew only more unsparing to both Watson and Lander.
As the scientific community rose up in fury against Lander for his admiring remarks to Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, no scientist was as unrelenting as Eisen. His tweets stirred up the science community, even as Lander apologized on Monday, saying he himself had been the subject of Watson’s anti-Semitism.
For many scientists, Lander’s response settled the issue. But Eisen, a years-long critic of Lander, said the event underscored how the scientific establishment needed to do some deeper soul searching over how the celebration of Watson for his 90th birthday happened in the first place.
“I hope we can all pause and think deeply about which scientists
