James Watson - AVOID BORING PEOPLE - Lessons from a Life in Science

Only two years later Summers's inability to get outside his own head landed him in fatally hot water. It reached the boiling point following his appearance at a conference sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research on women in science, which was held in Cambridge in mid-January 2005. There he suggested that the relatively small number of women in tenured positions in the physical sciences might in part be attributable to a lower frequency among women as compared to men of innate potential for doing science at the highest level. Aware that many women would not take kindly to these words, he was careful to leave open the alternative explanation

that in the past many talented women had been strongly discouraged by their teachers from ever trying to master top-level mathematics and sciences.

Summers's remarks might have gone unnoticed outside the meeting were it not for the presence of my former student, now a professor of biology at MIT, Nancy Hopkins. Over the past decade she had worked tirelessly and effectively to improve the working conditions of women scientists there. Before Nancy's highly visible efforts, the salaries and space assignments of women at MIT were notably unequal to those of their male counterparts. But Nancy did not challenge Summers at the meeting. Instead she instantly bolted from the room, later saying Summers's words made her sick, and soon appeared on national TV attacking him and setting off a firestorm of feminist anger.

It did Nancy Hopkins no particular credit as a scientist to admit that the mere hypothesis that there might be genetic differences between male and female brains—and therefore differences in the distribution of one form of cognitive potential—made her sick. Anyone sincerely interested in understanding the imbalance in the representation of men and women in science must reasonably be prepared at least to consider the extent to which nature may figure, even with clear evidence that nurture is strongly implicated. To my regret, Summers, instead of standing firm, within a week apologized publicly three times for being candid about what might well be a fact of evolution that academia will have to live with. Except for the psychologist Steve Pinker, no prominent Harvard scientist voiced a word in Summers's defense; I suspect the majority were fearful of being tarred with the brush of political incorrectness. If I were still a member of the faculty, the number of tenured scientists standing visibly behind the president in this matter would have literally doubled. But that would not have been enough to put out the flames. Apparently desperate, Summers soon contritely proposed a $50 million kitty to recruit more women to Harvard's senior science faculty.

The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers's dismissal late last February as Harvard's president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of disregard for the social niceties that ordinarily permit human

beings to work together for a common good. While academia almost expects its younger members to be brash and full of themselves, these qualities are most unbecoming in more seasoned members of the society, and generally fatal in leaders. Reading up on a topic the night before and then appearing at conferences with the bravado to suggest that one knows more than those who have spent their careers thinking about the issues at hand is no way for a president to act. Summers's non-age-adjusted IQ, moreover, at age fifty-one is likely 5 to 10 points lower than when he was a twenty-year-old Wunderkind. Harvard's longstanding mandatory retirement age of fifty-five for academics was never a matter of arbitrary ageism but a recognition born of experience that as academics age they live more by old ideas and less by new ones. Summers, still acting as if he were the brightest person in the room, was bound to offend people who knew better.

It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social ineptitude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist—the very cards that endowed him with great quantitative intelligence may also have disabled the normal faculties for reading human faces and voices. The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger's syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral “disabilities.” Like exceptional math aptitude, Asperger's occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. The reason why must remain a mystery until further research shows how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.

If Summers's tactlessness does, in fact, have a genetic basis, much of the anger toward him should rightly yield to sympathy. No longer can his upbringing be blamed for failing to instill in him the graces of the civilized individual. In any case, all discussion should stop as to whether his dismissal was unduly precipitous—it was in all likelihood overdue. Whether those prominent individuals who promoted his candidacy should hang their heads in shame, however, is less obvious.

Summers's departure has to be seen as the first of many necessary

Steps to reclaim for Harvard its once legitimate claim to primacy in science, at least relative to MIT. Toward that end, Tom Maniatis, having come to Cold Spring Harbor to receive its honorary degree in April 2006, prevailed upon me to agree to meet with Derek Bok, the former president, whom the Harvard Corporation had called to serve again until a new leader could be found. A time was soon set up for me and Derek to get together at what had been the home of many Harvard presidents before Bok, the grand Georgian structure on Quincy Street across from the Faculty Club, now called Loeb House.

The day before my 10:00 A.M. appointment, Liz and I drove up to Cambridge to see Tom and his multitalented Long Island-born partner, Rachel von Roeschlaub. After an hour of tennis at the famous Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, we drove in tandem to dinner at the Charles Hotel, where Liz and I were to stay the night. Before the food came, Tom described the brutal cuts in funding recently dealt out to Harvard's science departments when Summers had launched a massive hiring campaign in translational life sciences and committed large pots of cash to develop Allsten.

Derek's initial reaction to my furrowed face must have been the same as mine to his graying hairs. Neither of us could pass for middle-aged. Twenty-eight years had elapsed since we were last face to face at the June 1978 commencement ceremonies, on which occasion I was delighted to be receiving an honorary D.Sc. A photo from that day shows Derek at forty-eight and me at fifty, each happy with himself, with a few more good years left to advance the causes of Harvard (in his case) and of scientific research (in mine). Neither of us could then have suspected that nearly thirty years later we might yet have cause to meet in the service of both.

Knowing that a petitioner's allotted hour always passes quickly, I went straight to my main message: It was wrongheaded to build a huge Allsten biology complex to compensate for the lack of greatness increasingly enveloping the biology labs along Divinity Avenue. Most likely, I argued, it was the B+ level of most of Harvard's life sciences, both in Cambridge and across the vast medical complex, that would gravitate to the brochure-perfect new campus, resulting in very little

bang for the vast bucks that would be spent. This, I insisted, is not how great institutions are built.

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