‘I really don’t know what happened to Jim’: Friends ask where James Watson’s odious attitudes about race came from

Even before a documentary on biologist James Watson aired on Wednesday night as part of PBS’s “American Masters” series, social media was aflame with protests from scientists and others about its very existence: After Watson’s many statements denigrating blacks, women, and others, it is more than time for the media to “move on,” one biologist tweeted. Another protested giving oxygen to Watson’s “infuriating” and “unfounded comments about race,” while a biologist at the institution Watson ran for nearly 40 years decried his “racist bull—-” and “the harm it does to our science.”

Watson’s many odious comments over the decades might be blamed on age (he is 90), or irascibility, or a privileged white man’s raging at a world that no longer winks at  like “some anti-Semitism is justified.” But in interviews with STAT, longtime friends offered another explanation for