James D. Watson

I got out a book.

I read The Double Helix, which people will know that was James Watson, his version of the discovery of the structure of DNA, which happened in Cambridge in the 1950s, the early 1950s.

He was an American being in England.

And I just loved it.

Now, one of my heroes is Francis Crick.

And then, of course, there's James Watson.

What did you make of James Watson?

James Watson was promoting the same ideas that race scientists do, that black people are innately less intelligent than white people.

That is, it's pseudoscience.

There is no scientific basis for that.

I think a couple of things because I think we're losing that in Australia today.

So James Watson, who I worked with in the United States at Cold Spring Harbour, said to me, you must ask a big question.

Don't do the small stuff, just tackle a big question.

But you have to be brave to tackle a big question.

But this was a new question.

Adrian hadn't worked on it before.

I heard two or three things there, and I'm a bit of a science nerd, and I love the way, first of all, you just dropped James Watson.

Of course everybody knows who James Watson is, right? Just drop that in the statements.

They are remembered, recounted, and persist long-term, while the evanescent, daily incoherent dream sequences disappear and are quickly forgotten.

Some noted examples of dream experiences includes the discovery of the periodic table of elements by Dmitri Mendeleev, or James Watson's famous description of the double helix of DNA, both of which eventuated from dream experiences.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after a particularly frightening dream experience.

Some transcriptions of dream experiences come in symbolic forms and require interpretation.

ah, here it comes.

I was thinking about, was it James Watson or James Crick? Yes.

I forget.

I think it was Crick.

Hi, Sarah.

Can you briefly outline the story as it's been told over the decades, you know, the roles of Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick in the structure of DNA?

Rosalind Franklin was a crystallographer who was working on the structure of DNA in even before Watson and Crick got to work on it.

And the story has been that some of her data were crucial in their final determination of the structure of the molecule of life.

Part of the story was told by James Watson himself in his book, The Double Helix, which became notorious because of the way he talked about some of his colleagues and other people who contributed to the breakthrough, including Rosalind Franklin.

But it was also an extremely well-told story and really has dominated the way people think about this.

People have criticized it, people have reacted to it, but a lot of the narrative really comes from Watson.

So I know Blackburn, the Aussie, she never even gave it to her dog, I don't think.

But in contradistinction, I think James Watson, he was taking it for a long time, if not still taking it.

So that mean old guy is still alive and

kicking.

little

bit? James Watson, the novelist who described the DNA helix, he spent the last part of his life studying these molecules.

Well, not this product.

I don't even know if he knew about it.

One tends to be a little bit more outspoken, one a little bit more, uh, you know.

Watson and Crick, I'm sure there are just as many examples that don't fit.

Uh, but in thinking about leaders, not just religious leaders, can we, um, make any kind of generalization about, um, pairings, uh, two very, um, complementary people that are especially effective in getting escape velocity on their, on their leadership, their message?

I don't think so.

Let's talk about birds.

Yeah.

Um, the only other two birders, uh, I know from science are Jim Watson-

Hmm

Number 13, the Carpool Karaoke host was James Corden.

Number 14, the Nobel Prize winner was James Watson.

And number 15, the member of Metallica is James Hetfield.

Round four.