Political Activism
During his tenure as a professor at Harvard, Watson participated in several political protests:
- Vietnam War: While a professor at Harvard University, Watson, along with "12 Faculty members of the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology" including one other Nobel prize winner, spearheaded a resolution for "the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces' from Vietnam."
- Nuclear proliferation and environmentalism: In 1975, on the "thirtieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima," Watson along with "over 2000 scientists and engineers" spoke out against nuclear proliferation to President Ford in part because of the "lack of a proven method for the ultimate disposal of radioactive waste" and because "The writers of the declaration see the proliferation of nuclear plants as a major threat to American liberties and international safety because they say safeguard procedures are inadequate to prevent terrorist theft of commercial reactor-produced plutonium."
- In recent years, Watson has stated: "I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."
Read more about this topic: James D. Watson
Famous quotes containing the word political:
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)