Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (41 page)

But if Watson’s secretary had chosen to play a practical joke on me and send me to lunch with some other 75-year-old, I would have probably fallen for it. There is a striking disparity between the distinction of his achievement and the unfamiliarity of his face. Even his name is linked, Siamese twin-like, with Crick’s, and loses its resonance in isolation.

As Watson drives me to lunch at the Inn on the Harbor in the heart of Great Gatsby country in Long Island, New York, I ask him whether this lack of public recognition ever bothered him. With a rueful smile he
reflects that discovering the structure of DNA did little to help him propagate his own genes. ‘There were no groupies,’ he says. ‘Well, I suppose there were two but you wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to either of them.’

Instead Watson’s main reward was to see the discipline he co-founded start to mature. Munching on a breadstick, he muses on 50 years of genetics. It’s not just about attaining abstract knowledge about life. The potential of genetics to enhance life is massive, he says.

‘If God is not going to cure cancer then it’s up to us to do it,’ he says. If the Church really recognized miracles, he adds, it would have canonized Jonas Salk for his polio vaccine.

Outside religious circles, this is uncontroversial stuff. But Watson’s vision for genetics extends well beyond curing disease and into the hinterlands of political correctness. If genetic engineering can make people better-looking or brighter then all the better. ‘It is part of human nature for people to want to enhance themselves. When someone is good-looking or bright there is a tendency not to care about those who are not. Thirty years ago cosmetic surgery was almost amoral. Now hardly a politician can survive without it. To want your children to have a good throw of the genetic dice is extremely natural.’

From universal DNA fingerprinting to bizarre manipulations of animal DNA, Watson is prepared to endorse a range of uses for the technology that may make liberals blanch. ‘If everyone’s genetic fingerprint were taken,’ he observes, ‘it would take away our liberty to commit crime.’

More controversial still, Watson argues that if technology permits it, women should be able to abort homosexual foetuses. ‘Most women want grandchildren and do not say with glee that their son is homosexual,’ he says.

This kind of full frontal assault on political correctness has got Watson into hot water in the past. It is easy to see how his willingness to discuss the ethical vanishing point of genetics has sometimes obscured a genuinely humanitarian desire to limit human suffering.

As he ploughs through a veal escalope (I get the impression that this was a painful decision and that he had probably tried everything on the menu several times), Watson stresses that he wants genetics to be put in the hands of the user – more often than not, women.

‘These kinds of issues should not be decided by a group of government-appointed
wise men. We should leave it up to women and let them make their own choices.

‘There is far too much regulation. If nobody is hurt, then what is going too far? The idea that there is some fundamental order arranged by God is the origin of the whole fuck-up.’

Watson also advocates an understanding of genetics as an antidote to some of the self-delusions to which humans are prone. The discovery of DNA was the final step in the Copernican revolution that displaced humanity from the centre of the universe. ‘Human beings were even more mysterious before 1953 and psychoanalysis was taken seriously,’ he says.

Watson seldom resists the temptation to spike his reflections with barbed jokes. The fact that we now understand that humans are animals, he says, should help us recover from some of the unnecessary guilt that accompanies many of our fundamental desires. ‘You should not feel guilty about coveting your neighbour’s wife if she is better-looking or more fun. You cannot really change what you like.’

There is a restless energy to Watson that helps explain why he refused to sit on his laurels after unearthing the Rosetta Stone of life at an age at which few scientists even have doctorates. (He winces at my suggestion that he is the Macaulay Culkin of biology, whose greatest glory also came at the start of his career.) ‘This was not a time to rest,’ he says. ‘I still wanted to do something important.’

Watson wanted the grand slam. Having uncovered the structure of DNA he aimed to work out how genes provided the information to make proteins – the building blocks of living matter. He became convinced that DNA chains were copied on to strands of RNA, serving as templates to order the amino acids in proteins.

With barely a pause for breath, in 1953 Watson began his dual quest for RNA and a wife. (He later conceded that at the time he thought more about girls than genes.) As it happened, it wasn’t until he was 39 that he married a dazzlingly pretty 19-year-old sophomore from Radcliffe College.

‘I have always been in a hurry,’ he says. ‘The scientific community is not always in such a rush. If we are able to see the genetic basis of cancer or autism we will at least see the face of the enemy.’

Watson’s impatience to make genetics practical was heightened by the illness of his son, Rufus, who suffers from a form of autism thought
to be epilepsy of the thalamus. It was around the time of his son’s diagnosis in 1986 that Watson was installed as the chief cartographer in charge of mapping the human genome. On the subject of his son, who is now in hospital, the ever-effusive scientist starts to clam up. ‘I do not see the need for immortality. But I do have a sick son in hospital. If we knew enough science we could help him. Fame is irrelevant.’

For Watson, Rufus is a symbol of the genetic injustice that may be alleviated by the progress of recombinant DNA technology. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘the biggest practical impact of genetics has been in paternity suits and forensics. But they have found two genes for autism … so one day autistic children may not be born.’

However laudable his motives, Watson’s combination of impatience and almost total disregard for social pleasantries has ruffled more than a few feathers among fellow scientists. In his memoir of the period, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard biologist with whom Watson clashed over university appointments, dubbed Watson ‘the Caligula of biology’. ‘Watson,’ he said, ‘radiated contempt in all directions,’ and was the most unpleasant human being he had ever met.

Having grown quite fond of Watson’s disarming honesty, I found this description hard to recognize. I ask Watson – who by now has finished his food altogether and is staring at my half-completed plate with an air of expectation – whether he has mellowed with age.

‘People exaggerated my rudeness,’ he says. ‘I just wanted things to happen fast and I wanted Harvard to appoint the best people.’ (Watson became a professor at Harvard at 28, not so much because of its biology department as because it was a ‘girl-containing university’ – in contrast with the ‘girl-less Caltech’.) ‘If you are appointed editor of a paper where the staff are lousy, do you just wait until they die off? Besides, academia is a bit like an officer training corps. You need to be robust.’

I get the impression that Watson would make a delightful friend but a truculent colleague. (It seems fitting that his favourite among a batch of films out over the end-of-year holiday period is
Bad Santa
, the story of a cantankerous and outspoken Father Christmas.)

At 75 Watson may be preparing for posterity, but there is no indication he wants to hog the credit or disparage the runners-up in the race for DNA. As the waiter removes the remains of my tuna steak, I cautiously turn the conversation towards Rosalind Franklin, the brilliant
crystallographer whose X-ray pictures of DNA helped Crick and Watson towards double-helix theory. Franklin died in 1958 from ovarian cancer four years before Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize. Watson’s disparaging description of Franklin as the ‘dark lady’ of genetics helped ensure her status as a feminist icon, unjustly denied her share of the credit for a giant leap in science.

Although Watson was clearly not fond of Franklin – whom he describes as a massive snob – he makes no effort to conceal how close she came to taking the prize. ‘Rosalind should have discovered the structure of DNA a year before we did,’ he says. She just became interested in other things, he says. Relieved to get the question out of the way, I take a deep breath.

As the waiter arrives with the bill, Watson instructs me to leave a big tip. There are some social conventions that even Watson is happy to honour.

JAMIL ANDERLINI

Jamil was appointed the
Financial Times
’s Beijing bureau chief in February 2011. In 2010 he was named Journalist of the Year by the Society of Publishers in Asia, and in 2008 he won a UK Foreign Press Association Award. Born in Kuwait, Jamil grew up in the Middle East and New Zealand. He speaks and reads Mandarin Chinese and has lived mostly in Shanghai and Beijing since 2000. He is the author of an
FT
ebook,
The Bo Xilai Scandal: Power, Death, and Politics in China.

Bao Tong

PETER ASPDEN

Peter is the
Financial Times
’s arts writer, having previously been its arts editor for five years. He joined the paper in 1994, as deputy books and arts editor and a general feature writer on what was then known as the
Weekend FT
. He has written on numerous subjects, including travel, religion, politics, history, most art forms and sport.

Michael Caine

LIONEL BARBER

As editor of the
Financial Times
, Lionel has steered the
FT
to three Newspaper of the Year awards. He has co-written several books, has lectured widely and appears regularly on international TV and radio. In 2009 he was awarded the St George Society medal of honour. A long-time foreign correspondent in Washington, Brussels and New York, he is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Tate.

Martin Amis
;
Stephen Green

ROB BLACKHURST

Rob has written features and interviews for a variety of UK and American broadsheet newspapers and magazines. Since his first piece for the
FT
magazine in 2005, he has gone back to his old comprehensive to examine meritocracy, spent a week with Prince Andrew, met skateboarding friars, interviewed 9/11 families, and attended a camp for British creationists.

Ronnie Wood

PILITA CLARK

Pilita is the environment correspondent at the
Financial Times
, with a focus on the impact of emerging environmental trends and policies on businesses and investors. Prior to this role, she was the aerospace correspondent from 2009 to 2011 and deputy news editor on the main news desk at the
FT.
Before that she was deputy editor of the
FT
magazine.

Michael O’Leary

KIERAN COOKE

Kieran was a foreign correspondent for the
Financial Times
and BBC for many years. As
FT
correspondent in Ireland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was among those bombed and shot at by a Loyalist gunman in a Belfast cemetery. Although some were worried that his lunch with Martin McGuinness would give the Irish Republican Army (IRA) the oxygen of publicity, the group declared a ceasefire on the same day the piece was published. Kieran now teaches journalists in the developing world and specializes in environmental reporting.

Martin McGuinness

ROBERT COTTRELL

Robert was a
Financial Times
correspondent in Hong Kong from 1982 to 1984, and in Moscow from 2000 to 2003. He was also a staff writer for the
Economist
. He left journalism to launch a website, The Browser, in 2008.
Anatoly Chubais

ANDREW DAVIDSON

Andrew switched to writing the interview page of the
Sunday Times
business section in 2003 after writing a similar weekly interview for the
Financial Times.
He has won awards for Business Writer of the Year and Magazine Writer of the Year. He has published three books,
Smart Luck
,
Bloodlines
and
Under the Hammer
.

Jeff Bezos

WILLIAM DAWKINS

Will joined the
Financial Times
in 1981 and left in 2004 to become a headhunter. His career at the
FT
included the roles of publishing editor and foreign editor, after postings to Brussels, then Paris, followed by four years as the Tokyo bureau chief from 1993 to 1997. In 2009 he moved from Odgers Berndtson to become head of the UK board practice at Spencer Stuart, another executive search firm.

Akebono Taro

DANIEL DOMBEY

Daniel has been the
Financial Times
’s correspondent in Turkey since 2011. Before that, he was US diplomatic correspondent based in Washington DC. He previously covered diplomatic beats for the
FT
in both London and Brussels, as well as working as a financial markets reporter.

George Soros

BEVERLEY DOOLE

After several years among the hard-working Antipodeans on the
Financial Times
’s news floor, Beverley was appointed chief sub-editor on the
FT
magazine and she jumped at the chance to interview her country’s prime minister, Helen Clark, in 2006. Beverley is now a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues back in New Zealand.

Helen Clark

JAMES FERGUSON