 | Nathaniel Comfort Professor - Johns Hopkins University |
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03.08.2022-29.08.2022
The Nature and Nurture of James D. Watson
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02.03.2020-18.03.2020
The Nature and Nurture of James D. Watson
+To write a rigorous, compelling, original life of one of the most important and least understood figures of twentieth-century biology and medicine.
+To use the many thousands of pages of documents now available, as well as interviews, to correct or nuance the record on many points in Watson’s life.
+To chronicle the remarkable achievements—scientific, literary, pedagogical, and administrative—of Watson’s life, many of which have never received serious historical attention.
+To persuade readers that the notion of DNA as the “secret of life” is socially and culturally constructed—a historical set of events, not a natural truth of the universe.
+To tell a cultural history of biomedical research in late-twentieth-century America—one that may be put into constructive dialogue with the rich historical and social-scientific literature on genetics, eugenics, scientific racism, and the cultural authority of science.
+To continue my years of work on the relationship of genes to society by situating Watson within the history of eugenics, genetic determinism, and scientific racism. For his stellar career to end with being ostracized for scientific racism literally yards from the site of the Progressive-era Eugenics Record Office is positively Shakespearean. How did his life there shape his views on both science and society?
+To further our understanding of the relationship between science and race—how racism can creep into DNA science and how a life in DNA science may be a risk factor for typological, racist thinking.
Nathaniel Comfort is Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University, with interests in the histories of genetics, eugenics, and genomics, and in bioethics. He is the author of The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001) and The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), and editor of and contributor to The Panda’s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy. In 2015-2016 he was the Blumberg Professor of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress/NASA. His outward-facing work can be found in The Atlantic, The Nation, Nature, Science, the New York Times Book Review, on PBS and National Public Radio, and elsewhere. He is working on a biography of the biologist James D. Watson.
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