5 ms·

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire lif

Years ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of his talks on longevity. Other than the casual racism and sexism (Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people), he made a big comment on Linus Pauling's obsession towards the end of his life regarding Vitamin C consumption. The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old. Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?

Aurornis 1y ago
Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong. Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  >an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
  - manquer 1y ago
    Arguably it is worse. Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back. Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life. Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
    - moralestapia 1y ago
      >Einstein >diminished contributions in later part of his life Whew, that's a wild one.
      - manquer 1y ago
        What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen? I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing. In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results. It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
        peterfirefly 1y ago
        > is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out. What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
        manquer 1y ago
        I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing. I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1] I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence. [1] still got downvoted smh
  - tomcam 1y ago
    I have decades of experience as an unaccomplished nobody and I concur.
- JuniperMesos 1y ago
  Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs. Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
  - cenamus 1y ago
    Is not being allowed to have children with close relatives also eugenics? They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.
- vixen99 1y ago
  Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.
aerostable_slug 1y ago
> racist things about Irish people It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share. See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English) How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?
  - aerostable_slug 1y ago
    It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
    - LarsDu88 1y ago
      I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England.
ghuffed 1y ago
[flagged]
griffzhowl 1y ago
> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem. Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    I don't think it's a chicken or egg problem. We still have the non-functional form of the gene for synthesizing vitamin C in our genomes. It's been identified, and the mutation which knocked out it's functionality is known. This was a single event. If the primate who had this variant didn't already have a diet high in vitamin C, it wouldn't have survived. And since their diet was high in vitamin C, they obviously had the sensory apparatus necessary for detecting the food sources
rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?

Aurornis 1y ago

Linus Pauling's obsession with Vitamin C is a famous case of an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery. Even during his lifetime there were clinical trials including by the Mayo Clinic that failed to support his claims, but he rejected them all because he was convinced he was right and they were wrong. Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.

moralestapia 1y ago
>an accomplished scientist getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
- manquer 1y ago
  Arguably it is worse. Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back. Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life. Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
  - moralestapia 1y ago
    >Einstein >diminished contributions in later part of his life Whew, that's a wild one.
    - manquer 1y ago
      What exactly is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life that he spent trying to build a unified field theory ? The rest of the physics community at the time(and even largely now) did not share his ideas, maybe grand unified theory is possible maybe not, but getting stuck with it without a lot of progress did happen? I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing. In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results. It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
      - peterfirefly 1y ago
        > is wild about the 30 odd years of his later life There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out. What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
        manquer 1y ago
        I only said he became far less productive for his level of talent not that he completely stopped contributing. I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1] I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence. [1] still got downvoted smh
- tomcam 1y ago
  I have decades of experience as an unaccomplished nobody and I concur.
JuniperMesos 1y ago
Sounds pretty similar to the program of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dor_Yeshorim with respect to generic diseases common in Jewish populations like Tay-Sachs. Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
- cenamus 1y ago
  Is not being allowed to have children with close relatives also eugenics? They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.
vixen99 1y ago
Nobody wants the sickle cell anaemia mutated gene for haemoglobin except insofar that it confers some measure of protection against malaria which is presumably how it's managed to survive.

aerostable_slug 1y ago

> racist things about Irish people It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share. See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.

LarsDu88 1y ago
It didn't come off as self-deprecating at all, although I see that he had a grandmother from Ireland (unclear if she was ethnically Irish or English) How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  It is if he would describe a member of his own family this way, which I'm betting he would. He was rather famously described as a "tough Irishman" by his longtime friend, biologist Mark Ptashne.
  - LarsDu88 1y ago
    I'm surprised he identified as such. Dude is from Chicago but talks like someone from England.

ghuffed 1y ago

[flagged]

griffzhowl 1y ago

> primates ... lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.

LarsDu88 1y ago
This is probably the more likely scenario, but it's really a chicken or the egg problem. Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  I don't think it's a chicken or egg problem. We still have the non-functional form of the gene for synthesizing vitamin C in our genomes. It's been identified, and the mutation which knocked out it's functionality is known. This was a single event. If the primate who had this variant didn't already have a diet high in vitamin C, it wouldn't have survived. And since their diet was high in vitamin C, they obviously had the sensory apparatus necessary for detecting the food sources

rufus_foreman 1y ago

>> Watson is the only person in my entire life I've seen say racist things about Irish people Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?