PERSON
James D. Watson
The molecular biologist who, with Francis Crick, established that heredity is information—founding the age of computational biology—and whose later insistence that genetics proves innate racial differences in intelligence makes him the most instructive available case of a brilliant mind crossing the line from fact to verdict, the exact failure our machines are built to industrialize.
Watson's 1953 proposal, with Francis Crick, that DNA is a double helix whose structure immediately suggests a copying mechanism for genetic information is one of the founding acts of the information age: it established that life is written in a code of four letters, that the code can in principle be read, and that the tools of computation apply to the deepest secrets of heredity. Everything AI now does in biology—AlphaFold predicting protein structures, genomic models learning the statistical grammar of variation, generative systems composing proteins evolution never produced—descends from the recognition that the genome is a dataset and that biological pattern-finding is a problem for machine learning. But Watson is in the cycle not only for the genius. He is here for the disgrace: decades of public insistence, defended to the end of his life, that genetics establishes innate
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