One morning around four or five years ago, I got a phone call from James Watson. I was startled. I had met him only once, at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor in the mid-1990s and we hadn't been in touch since. I can remember few details, but I do remember that the call lasted for at least twenty minutes and that I soon realized that my job was to listen. James Watson needed a sympathetic ear.
Perhaps he saw me as someone who had experienced on a far smaller scale something similar to what he had experienced. Perhaps he figured (correctly) that I would agree with what pained him the most: He hadn't done anything wrong. He had spoken candidly about his assessment of the evidence regarding the B/W difference in IQ. His conclusion that genetics were part of the story was shared by the majority of specialists in IQ. And yet his professional career and reputation had been devastated.
He wanted to live long enough for his remarks to be vindicated. I do remember reminding him of some good news. Since the genome had been sequenced, it had been established that evolutionary change had taken place after the dispersal from Africa and that the change had been mostly local, not shared across continents. The genetic evidence from GWAS studies had already found ubiquitous population differences across all the races, including variants associated with cognition. Vindication would come. But I got no sense that I had done anything to ease his anguish.
Now he is dead. In a half century, his reputation as one of history's great biologists will have been restored. People will know that he had the misfortune to reach old age in an era when the academy was lunatic. I hope he realized that before the end.