That one person separates me, an African-American computational biologist, from James Watson-Nobel Laureate and mouthpiece of racist opinions-presents a quandary. His comments led Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the renowned research institution that Watson has been long associated with, to strip him of his honorary titles. Shortly afterwards, he issued an apology, telling the Associated Press, “There is no scientific basis for such a belief.' But earlier this month, he doubled down on this sentiment during the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson. That year he made comments about, among other things, the dim prospects for the continent of Africa and its descendants, a fate he attributed to inferior intelligence. While Watson has always been a curious character, it wasn’t until 2007 that his personality caught up to his mythology. In effect-through his direct connection to Gottesman and because Watson’s work helped establish my fields of study-James Watson can be considered my academic ancestor. Early in her own career, however, Gottesman was an undergraduate research assistant in the lab of James Watson, the famed co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. A pioneering microbiologist, Gottesman is best known for her foundational work in bacterial gene regulation. My career began as a research assistant in the laboratory of Susan Gottesman at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. Brandon Ogbunu is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University and a computational biologist interested in disease.

James whatson