Today In History (April 25 1874, 1953)

[AustrianPainter]

TODAY IN HISTORY

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1874: Guglielmo Marconi, Italian-Irish radio pioneer who first made wireless communication practical, is born in Bologna, Italy. He was the recipient of many honors from several European countries, and was made a member of Mussolini's Fascist Grand Council. He stated, "I reclaim the honor of being the first fascist in the field of radiotelegraphy, the first who acknowledged the utility of joining the electric rays in a bundle, as Mussolini was the first in the political field who acknowledged the necessity of merging all the healthy energies of the country into a bundle, for the growing greatness of Italy."
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TODAY IN HISTORY

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1953: Francis Crick (left) and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" describing for the first time the double helix structure of DNA and making the modern study of genetics possible. Crick, who died in 2004, believed that eugenics was a goal that society would eventually embrace, stating, "I would be astonished if, in the next 100 or 200 years, society did not come round to the view that they would have to try to improve the next generation...." Watson, who at this writing in 2020 is still alive, was in recent years stripped of his honors and positions for refusing to back down from his numerous statements expressing his belief that the human races are not equal and that eugenic improvement is a worthy goal.

[Will Williams]

In early 2007 Watson’s own genome was sequenced and made publicly available on the Internet. He was the second person in history to have a personal genome sequenced in its entirety. In October of the same year, he sparked controversy by making a public statement referring to the idea that the intelligence of Africans might not be the same as that of other peoples and that intellectual differences between geographically separated peoples might arise over time as a result of genetic divergence. Watson’s remarks were immediately denounced as racist. Though he denied this charge, he resigned from his position at Cold Spring Harbor and formally announced his retirement less than two weeks later. In January 2019 the Cold Spring Harbor administration divested him of the honorary titles the laboratory had bestowed upon him. The decision came after the airing of the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson, in which Watson stated that his views on race and intelligence had not changed.

Watson also asserted there was no reason to believe different races separated by geography should have evolved identically, and he said that while he hoped everyone was equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."

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It is not very likely that Dr. James D. Watson is still alive today since he was 90-years-old in 2019, but in an Internet search for him today nothing is found since 2019. Apparently, he has been shunted down the Memory Hole for blurting out such scientific truisms about racial differennces.

I'm reminded of Dr. Pierce's statement on the Political Correctness of the scientific cummunity and media in his ADV broadcast about another DNA "expert," Craig Venter, 25 years ago: https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/12/th ... rrectness/

...[E]verything I’ve said so far today is by way of introduction to a couple of really depressing illustrations of the decline in virility in that segment of our society that in healthier times was on the cutting edge of our climb upward toward the stars and was the purest embodiment of our Faustian spirit — and that is our scientific/academic segment, the seekers of knowledge and understanding.

Let’s begin with something everyone has heard about very recently: the mapping of the human genome: which is to say the determination of the sequence of the amino acid building blocks in the long strands of human genetic material that determine what we are. That is certainly a grand and worthwhile project, even if it is more a massive application of technology than a scientific breakthrough. And to me it really is depressing to have to note that some of the people involved in this grand project are so much in the grip of Political Correctness that their ability to do meaningful or valid science is in real doubt. One of the actors in the genome mapping project is J. Craig Venter, who is the president of a biotechnology company called Celera Genomics Corporation. Mr. Venter and his company hope to make lots of money from their genome mapping work by selling the results to pharmaceutical companies. And Mr. Venter also wants to be very sure that his company is in the forefront of Political Correctness as well as biotechnology.

At a White House ceremony a few days ago, in which several of the genome project’s leaders met with Bill Clinton to make a public but somewhat premature announcement of the completion of the project, Venter used the occasion to tell the world that his company had used DNA from five individuals in its mapping work, and among those five were a mestizo, a Black, an Asian, and a White. The choice of DNA donors had been made, he said — and I quote — “out of respect for the diversity that is America and to help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” — end of quote — Really. Blacks are not Blacks for genetic reasons but because of poverty and discrimination, I suppose — or to be really Correct, Blacks are different from us only because of White racism, not because their genes are different.

That’s about as silly and anti-scientific a statement as I have heard in this silly era. It’s what one might have expected from the late Carl Sagan or some of the other Jewish pseudo-scientific gurus of Political Correctness, who spend much more time in front of the TV cameras propagandizing the couch potatoes than they spend in the laboratory, but it really is depressing to hear that coming from the head of a cutting-edge biotechnology firm. Perhaps Mr. Venter figures that his show of Political Correctness will help him garner a government grant. Anyway, any errors introduced into his part of the genome mapping because of his insistence that no differences be found among the genomes of the various races can be corrected later by objective researchers, but it is really disappointing that none of these objective researchers had the courage to speak up or even to laugh after he made his silly statement at the White House.

Well, I suppose that’s no worse than the situation we had in the Middle Ages, when the priests would awe the peasants with the announcement that some statue in the church had been seen to weep real tears or to bleed from nail holes in its hands or feet, and the scientific-minded citizens would bite their lips in order to avoid laughing. In those days Politically Incorrect laughter could get a person burned at the stake. But really, it’s a shame that we haven’t made more progress in that regard during the past few centuries. Or to state the case more precisely, it’s a shame that we seem now to be sliding back toward the climate of superstition and fear and Political Correctness which prevailed at times in the past.