Below is a lightly edited, AI-generated transcript of the “First Opinion Podcast” interview with Nancy Hopkins. Be sure to sign up for the weekly “First Opinion Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Get alerts about each new episode by signing up for the “First Opinion Podcast” newsletter. And don’t forget to sign up for the First Opinion newsletter, delivered every Sunday.
Torie Bosch: James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, died last week at the age of 97. He was a scientific giant and a very controversial figure. In the final two decades of his life, he falsely stated that women and Black people are, as populations, not as smart as white men.
Nancy Hopkins knew Watson better than most, having first worked with him when she was just an undergraduate. She credits him with helping her illustrious career, but she also doesn’t shy away from criticizing the turn he took later in life.
Welcome to the “First Opinion Podcast.” I’m Torie Bosch, editor of First Opinion. First Opinion is STAT’s home for big, bold ideas from health care providers, researchers, patients, and others who have something to say about medicine’s most important and interesting topics.
Today I’m speaking with Nancy Hopkins. Nancy is a retired MIT professor known for her work on zebrafish as a cancer model, and for her advocacy on behalf of women in science. She is the co-founder of the Boston Biotech Working Group, which aims to foster women faculty as founders and board members. She also worked closely with James Watson.
After a quick break, I’ll bring you our conversation about her complicated feelings about Watson and his legacy.
Nancy Hopkins, welcome to the First Opinion Podcast.
Nancy Hopkins: Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Bosch: Can you tell me about when you first met James Watson?
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
Hopkins: Oh, I’d love to. It was a defining moment of my adult life. Yes, I was an undergraduate at Radcliffe College, the women’s division of Harvard in that era, and I was a junior in college, and I was thinking of going to medical school, maybe. And the only basic science course I hadn’t taken was biology. So I signed up for introductory bio two. And one of the lecturers was Jim Watson, and he was the second in the series. They were all excellent, and he came in and changed my life in one hour, and he revealed the secret of life in one hour. And I just knew I was hooked. That was it for me. So I was just incredibly lucky.
And then at that time, you know, he took undergraduates to work in his lab. So I thought, “Oh my gosh, when he disappears from the class, what am I gonna do? I’m gonna be bereft.” So I went and asked if I could work in his lab and he said yes, and I did, and we became lifelong friends.
Bosch: And what year was this?
Hopkins: 1963. So I was 19, I graduated from college in 1964. But it was ’63 that I took the class.
Bosch: And what was it about that one-hour guest lecture that that changed the course of your life, as you say?
Hopkins: Well I think everybody tries to find the meaning of life. And for me the meaning of life was the secret of life. In other words, the meaning of life really was how scientists looked at the natural world. And to me that’s as close to God as I’m going to probably get in my lifetime. And I was searching for answers like all young people are. What’s the meaning of life? Why am I here? What’s going on? Why is the world such a disaster? You know, the usual stuff, why did my mother get cancer when I was young and scare me to death? These things.
I wanted answers and I wanted solutions and here it was. It felt to me as if DNA was the answer to all the things that bothered a young person. And Jim seemed to hold the key to that. Knowledge in that future. I think remarkably, in the space of that hour, I really could see that one day this science, this DNA science, was going to cure many diseases, maybe help us understand the brain, even human behavior. We had a pretty simplistic view, actually, of how powerful it was going to be. One gene, one trait. [It] went a little more complicated as time went by. But on the whole, it was true. And there he was, the founder of this field, a founder of the field, and accessible, and he could interact with undergraduates in a way that made us feel we were really part of that future. And he was with us.
Bosch: And so 1963, where was that in his career?
Hopkins: I think he won the Nobel Prize the year before I heard him lecture, so I guess I might have read about him, but honestly I had vague view of how important the Nobel Prize was. I wasn’t that impressed by that. I was too young to know. But I was mighty impressed by what he had to say. And so he was now a tenured professor at Harvard at the age of what, 36, I think. It’s unimaginable almost, isn’t it? Because we thought of him as, you know, grown up. Although he really wasn’t, he really was one of just one of us kids. But yeah, so he was a tenured professor with this incredible accomplishment and founding a field.
Bosch: And what was it like working in his lab?
Hopkins: Oh it was it was just thrilling. Again, being so young, I think I did appreciate it at the time, just because it was so much fun. He loved talking to people. He was completely engaged with his colleagues and with his students. They had tea every afternoon. He’d be on the phone with all the molecular biologists in the world — there weren’t that many — and getting the latest hot news off the wire. And then he’d come rushing into tea and tell us, you know, some important discovery. So he and I had worked in a little lab where there were three of us undergraduates. His office was adjacent and there was a door connecting and sometimes, you know, the door would fly open and Jim said, “Lunch!” and he was looking for somebody to go to lunch with. He also — this is something I think people don’t really know about Jim so much. He was very people-oriented and very family-oriented, and his mother had died quite young in her life, and his father was alone therefore. And Jim took incredible care of his father. They lived in adjacent apartments in Harvard Square. And so he knew his father needed entertainment, so he would bring students by to meet his father and chat with him. So I became quite good friends with his father. And he would take his father on cruises to entertain him and take him out to dinner all the time. When I was in college my father died when I was a sophomore, and so my mother was alone and he was very sensitive to that. So when I graduated he wanted to make sure to take her to lunch so that she wouldn’t feel alone. And I think it’s a side of him that is not widely known really, of how loyal he is to his students, his trainees, his colleagues that he hired, and to his family.
Bosch: I think I read somewhere that he encouraged you to go on to get your Ph.D. Is that correct?
Hopkins: Absolutely. You see, I I heard this talk and I thought, “I’ve gotta do this, the science, I gotta do this.” But women in my generation really had no future in terms of being a professor. It just wasn’t an option. And I thought it was a women’s choice. I hadn’t realized no, they couldn’t be hired. OK. So I had no intention of doing that, but I certainly thought I could win a Nobel Prize. You know, after all Jim had done it when he was 25. Why not me? I mean, seriously. Can you imagine the arrogance?
Anyway, so I thought, “Well, I’ll just go and work in the lab and I’ll try to find the most important problem. I’ll work on that. I’ll win my Nobel Prize and then I’ll go and, you know, be married and have children and follow my husband to follow his career.” And that’s what I thought was gonna happen, but Jim had other ideas. And he saw how much I loved it, and he pushed me to apply to graduate school. And I went to Yale and I ran around the most important problem at that moment, [which] was to isolate what’s called a repressor and to see if it bound to specific DNA sequences. And so I was only willing to work on that one problem.
And when I got to Yale, I ran around saying, “Who’s working on the repressor?” And people said, “Are you crazy? That’s too hard a problem.” I said, “I gotta get out of this place. I gotta get back to Harvard,” where I knew there were two people who were working on it. So I dropped out of graduate school and went to work as a technician for Mark Ptashne, who was a junior fellow at the time at Harvard, not yet a professor himself, but a junior fellow. And it was thrilling because together we actually succeeded in this impossible project. And Mark got a professorship at Harvard. And I then was ready to retire. I said, “Well, that’s as good as I’m gonna do in my life. I’ll just I’ll just retire now. I’m 25, whatever.”
But Jim came up one day to the lab and he said, “Well, OK, now you have to get your Ph.D.” I said, “Ph.D.? What do you mean?” He said, “Yeah, you gotta get your Ph.D. now.” So soon I was enrolled at Harvard and I was pretty surprised by this. So yes, he really did push me to forward and it certainly couldn’t have happened without him in that era because unless you were, you know, related to somebody powerful or you had a mentor like that, it would not have been possible. And it wouldn’t have occurred to me, honestly, given the culture.
Bosch: Were there other women around or or were you the only woman typically?
Hopkins: There were two others who I knew of. One, I didn’t know her, but I knew of her because she was already something of a legend from her and that was Joan Steitz, and she went on and became one of the leading molecular biologists of her generation and remained also a mentee and friend of Jim Watson’s for life.
There was another wonderful woman named Jan Perrault, at that time who was also supported by Jim and she got a faculty job and then decided to go to biotech later on. So there weren’t many. There were not many. And in terms of faculty or tenured faculty, there were none. I mean, the first one was the wife of George Wald, and she was a spectacular scientist, totally deserved to be on the faculty and became a feminist to help other women. She was remarkable.
Bosch: I’m glad you mentioned she was helping other women. I’m curious about the dynamic between you and the other women. Was it something where you all sort of worked together to help each other or did it feel sort of like, “We have to stay away from each other so we don’t get pegged as ‘the women’”?
Hopkins: No, I think because at the time, honestly, I was just so naive, really. And partly because Jim was so supportive. He was the most powerful person in the field, urging you on. So why would you think there was discrimination against women? I didn’t know anything about the history of women in science. I didn’t know anything about anything. I didn’t know what feminists were talking about. We were people who were just obsessed with science. And I think we were so focused on it. And we got support as young people. From Mark Ptashne I got support. From Guido Guidotti, who was another faculty at Harvard at the time, I got tremendous support. I didn’t know what these people were talking about and I didn’t care. It was working for me. So it took a long time before I really realized what was going on.
Bosch: So in the ’90s, you started a really influential campaign on the campus at MIT to fight discrimination against women. Can you tell us a little bit about that and then we’ll go back to Jim? But I wanna hear more about you first.
Hopkins: Yeah, well, what happened was, as I say, I didn’t know there was discrimination against women. I thought it was a completely merit-based system. And it took me 20 years to figure out, to be certain within myself that it was not a merit-based system. Women were not valued equally when they made scientific discoveries or made scientific comments of equal importance to men. They were not valued equally and this had serious consequences for how hard they had to work, for their careers, for their recognition and so forth. And I thought I was the only person who’d figured this out, which is also extraordinary given my age by then. There really is no excuse for this. If I’d been hadn’t had my head in a test tube my whole life, I might have figured it out.
Bosch: That should be the title of your next book, by the way.
Hopkins: “Take Your Head Out of the Test Tube Now.” Good point. I’ll remember that. It’s too late for me, but somebody else might benefit from that. Yeah. I began to wonder, “is it me? Am I doing something wrong? Am I really not good enough?” Because that’s what you really think. The way I approached it was to look at how other women were treated and to take their discoveries and match them in my mind against men who had made discoveries and how is that woman treated and how’s he treated? And over 20 years, it took a long time. There were so few women, of course, it took a long time, and I was only interested in the ones who were very high-level people. There were very few, so took time.
But it was so clear, after 20 years there was no … I just could predict sort of what was gonna happen. And by then I had dealt with it long enough that I was really on the verge of quitting science. I thought of leaving MIT, I thought it might be an MIT problem. I thought it was the field was very competitive, or it was something in the culture of MIT.
And I asked Jim about that and I said, “I’m thinking of leaving,” and he was so supportive of me through those years. Again, when had terrible times, I’d talk to Jim and Jim would say, “Keep going, give ’em hell.” So this kind of thing. And I talked to him about leaving and looking for somewhere else. And he said, “It’s gonna be the same any anywhere you go.” And that really did stop me in my tracks.
But I got to a point where I couldn’t continue because it was just too unpleasant and exhausting. And I decided, well, what do I have to lose? You know, I might as well fight this battle. And to my absolute surprise, I went and talked to another woman who I hugely admired, Mary-Lou Pardue, and she’d already figured it out too. And once she said, “It’s all true, Nancy,” I said, “Now MIT has a problem.” It’s not just me with a problem, ’cause Mary-Lou was the first woman on the science faculty of MIT elected to the National Academy of Sciences. And I admired her enormously. And she was very politically wise and just a wise person, a wonderful person. I thought, “Oh boy.”
And we looked at each other and said, “You don’t suppose they have more of them who figured it out, do you?” We made a list and were startled by the small number of women. There were, you know, 15 tenured women and 197 men or something like this. And this was, you know, quite a long time after affirmative action, civil rights had kicked in, so what was happening here.
Anyway, we went and talked to them and the rest, as they say, is sort of history. So the women had all figured it out, or they knew something was wrong. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it was wrong. So they signed on, all but one person signed on in the end, and we became a group, and it was through the power of that group of women who were so successful. Out of that group of women today, four have won the U.S. National Medal of Science. Eleven of the 16 were members of the National Academy and so forth. And they’ve won, some of them, every award. Two or three of them are institute professors, which is the greatest honor at MIT.
So it was that alliance that made it possible for us to talk to the university in a serious way. And they listened. Dean [Robert] Birgeneau, School of Science, listened, and then the head of the chair of the faculty became a woman named Lotte Bailyn. She asked us to write up our findings from the data we had collected with Dean Birgeneau’s blessings. And we wrote a report and the president of MIT endorsed it. And that changed my life and changed MIT and had a probably why we’re speaking today.
Bosch: Changed universities well beyond MIT as well. And while you were doing this work, were you discussing it with Jim at all?
Hopkins: Yes, I mean when it was just me fighting, he was totally on my side. When I came up for tenure there was a powerful man who didn’t like me and I was told I would have to leave MIT and I called him and said, “I think I’ve just been fired,” and he said, “Oh, what happened?” I told him and he said, “Don’t pay any attention to those people. Just keep doing your work. And if your letters are good enough when your tenure letters come in and don’t give you tenure, just tell ’em I’ll sue them.” And that was very encouraging in a way. My work was going well at the time. And when the tenure cases came up, mine was ranked No. 1. So I did get tenure. And again, thanks to Jim encouraging me not to drop out or leave or whatever. So he was supportive. He didn’t just abandon his students and trainees and colleagues once they left his orbit. He kept them for life. So he supported [me] for life.
Bosch: Was he supportive of your organizing work at MIT on behalf of other women as well?
Hopkins: OK, so then he supported me individually. But when the report came out, I happened to be visiting Jim and his wife in Cold Spring Harbor and they were good friends and I was staying with them, I think. And he said jovially one day, “Nancy, you know none of that’s true. Yeah, that report you wrote.” I said, “What? What are you talking about?” He said, “If you want to be a great scientist, you have to be a shit, and women aren’t.” He was supposed to really be making a joke, but he meant it. And I knew what he meant because that’s sort of the way he approached the thing. Like “You gotta fight all the time. You’ve got to be out fighting, it’s a big competition.” And so I heard him, but I didn’t take it that seriously.
But later it became serious when Jim went down a different road than the one I was familiar with.
Bosch: Yeah, and that’s what I wanted to talk about next, which, I’m sure this must be a really complicated time for you emotionally. You know, someone who is so supportive of your career and you personally is now gone, but those of us who didn’t know him are also reckoning publicly with this other side, which I imagine you must be thinking about a lot right now too.
Hopkins: I am, Torie, and thank you for raising it because I think it’s a tremendously important issue of, how do we deal with a true giant, you know, an Einstein type of person. How do you deal with that when other behaviors appear which are really unacceptable and wrong and unscientific? Yes.
Bosch: “Unscientific” is really the part that’s so interesting here in so many ways.
Hopkins: I agree. And the question is, was it always there? Or was it some really form of illness that came on later in his life? And I don’t really know. I mean, there were signs of it. He had this combative [side] and he said odd things and of course another thing is he was very outspoken to his friends and then people like I’m talking to you now and I’m telling you private things, conversations we had. You know, anything he said might be released to the public, so there’s that problem. But he did come to hold these beliefs, and he did. And they are wrong and unscientific and extremely hurtful. And It’s a very hard thing to deal with.
‘I really don’t know what happened to Jim’: Friends ask where James Watson’s odious attitudes about race came from
Bosch: So my understanding is that around 2005, 2006, 2007, it started to become clear that he, both in a book and I believe in public remarks as well, that he believed that, to put it plainly, women and Black people are not naturally as intelligent as white men, and that’s the reason for less representation in science. Is that a fair way to put it, do you think?
Hopkins: Yes. I do yeah, that’s it. That’s what he said.
Bosch: And how did you feel when you first heard him saying these things? I mean, was it in public, or was he saying things like this in private to you as well?
Hopkins: Well, he came to see me. This was not something I talked about, but now I guess it seems like it’s time. Well anyway, he came to see me [in 2005]. I had walked out on Larry Summers when Larry Summers said that women were essentially genetically inferior in in STEM fields. And Jim came to see me.
Bosch: Sorry, Larry Summers was president of Harvard at the time, right?
Hopkins: Yes, and I had attended a meeting that was about it. The people who were attending were experts in the field. There was a small meeting and people expected to hear him talk about solutions to the underrepresentation of women. Instead he informed us that they were genetically inferior, basically, intrinsically inferior.
So I thought to myself, “You know, I’m just too old. We’ve fought this battle, it’s been very successful. The universities have all accepted it as it’s reality.” So I was sitting at my desk and [Jim] was standing in the door, and he didn’t come in and sit down. Usually when he was in town, we had dinner together, and so on. He said, “You have to apologize to Larry Summers, and if you don’t, you’ll never see me again.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Because Larry Summers is right. Girls can’t do science.”
I said, “Well, how can I say that publicly? Because I teach at MIT and half the students are women and they do just as well as the men. In fact, they may have higher grades. So how can I say it’s true, it’s not true.” And I said, “Why do you think it’s true?” And he said, “Well, Steve Pinker said it’s true.” And I said, “Steve Pinker? But Steve Pinker’s not a scientist. Steve Pinker’s a popularizer. Larry Summers is an economist. Why would you … this is not science, you know.” And well, he said, “Well well, I don’t know, but … you’ve destroyed Harvard by saying, by what you’ve done.”
And so he was feeling very sad about Harvard. I think, you know, it was very emotional. He’d been at Harvard and it was in turmoil because Larry Summers had made these comments. Well, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, really. I didn’t think I was destroying Harvard, I was trying to, I don’t know, you know, trying to stick to the facts.
Anyway, I thought it was an emotional moment, but then it was the beginning. Oh, it wasn’t even the beginning. It was slightly into the beginning. At around age 70, he began to go down this road. And it got worse and worse. And I have no explanation for it. I really don’t. I think it may have been, you know, some organic biological thing that he had, a stroke or aging. I don’t know what it was. I’ve talked with his son about it. He has two sons, and one of them has schizophrenia, as you know. And the other one does not, wonderful kid and young man. And he said, you know, when he was growing up, Jim never said things like this. So where did it come from? And he was trying to pinpoint what is the date that you first saw this stuff emerge. And I really don’t know.
I think that he sort of reverted to the simplistic idea he wants to find a gene that explains everything. He went back to some childish view of genes that we had when we were young.
Bosch: Right, so oversimplifying and going back right to the idea that struck you when you were 19, that this can explain everything.
Hopkins: Yes, there’ll be a math gene and a music gene and you know, no, it’s so complicated. And I sometimes I thought, you know, the tragedy of his life was this schizophrenic child he had, he had adored this child, and that he wanted to find the gene for schizophrenia and then he could cure Rufus. And that drove a lot of his misery and years of looking for the solution. Setting up neurobiology at Cold Spring Harbor even, you know, hoping to find the genes that would make it possible to cure Rufus. But [that] doesn’t explain, nor does it allow you to really forgive. I mean, he was too smart not to realize the damage that could be done by these kinds of false science comments.
Bosch: Yeah, so you mentioned that in his own lab with you and with other women, he very clearly respected your intelligence. Did you, was his lab diverse, you know, ethnically as well early on?
Hopkins: Trying to think, the people he hired tended to be Jewish actually. Now if you consider that diverse, I don’t know. I mean at Harvard in MIT it’s hardly noticeable because there’s so many people who are Jewish in science and they’ve been so successful. But Jim went out and got Wally Gilbert, who of course went on and won a Nobel Prize. He got Mark Ptashne who went on and won every award but the Nobel Prize. So from that point of view … as for Black students in science, there were almost none. Close to none and on the faculty, you know, almost none. Women, you know, I mean, what was interesting, yes, in terms of women, Jim was at the cutting edge, he was ahead of the cutting edge in terms of seeking out women who could be promoted. So I don’t know that anybody ever thought about it, really. I don’t know.
Bosch: I would have frankly been surprised if there was, but I figured I would ask.
Hopkins: As I went on and learned, there were women who had tried to go to graduate school at Harvard, say in physics, I knew Evelyn Fox Keller, and she dropped out. She said it was impossible. You just couldn’t be taken seriously. I think in some fields and Jim, as I say, helped to break the barrier for women in molecular biology. And I should say one more thing also about it. His father also was one of the, I mean, I hadn’t met such left-leaning Democrats as Jim and his father until I met them. And so they were all into the helping the downtrodden and unions, supporting unions. So I often wonder what would Jim’s father say about the things he said later, which were so different from what he was like when he was young.
Bosch: So going back to his later years, did you speak again after your argument — I don’t know if you call it an argument, but after your discussion about Larry Summers?
Hopkins: Yes. We did because I was getting married for a second time and had been single for 30 years. And Mark Ptashne said, “Did you invite Jim to your wedding?” I said, “Well, no, ’cause I don’t think he’d come.” He said, “You have to invite Jim. He’d be very hurt.” So I did, and of course he came. And then we became friends again and then we started seeing each other again. That was a very nice thing. I was glad I’d done it.
But it was never quite the same. And when I saw him, sometimes he was the old Jim. It was just the same. And other days he was off on this strange stuff. So it was a mixed thing, but I was very glad that we became friends and in fact they were going to organize a 98th birthday party for him in April. And they asked him to name 10 people he wanted to come to his birthday party and I was one of them, of course, and so I was so looking forward to it with Liz, his wife, and his son. And we decided, they had decided that they knew he was very unwell and he maybe was not going to live long. So they were going to celebrate his 100th birthday every year from now on. So this was gonna be the 98th in April and he didn’t quite make it.
Bosch: How did you handle it when he started, you know, as you say, speaking in a way that was not like the old Jim?
Hopkins: Well, you can’t defend it. You can’t say it’s right. Most discrimination is, I think, a belief in the inferiority of a group of people. You know, a sort of intrinsic inferiority of groups. And it isn’t science. It just isn’t.
And I actually had one very interesting conversation with Jim in his office about it again later in his late years, can’t remember what year it was. And I told him about unconscious bias. And he was fascinated by it. He said, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” And he hadn’t, I don’t think he’d really heard about it. Whereas I consider it to be one of the great scientific discoveries ever made. And [Daniel] Kahneman, you know, who got the Nobel Prize for that discovery in economics. I think there should be another one for the people who did the research showing the gender and race bias. But so Jim was fascinated by it, but it wasn’t enough to put him back on a different path. Somehow I’ve read an interesting thing by Nathaniel Comfort who’s written about Jim a lot and worked with him. He thinks the book called “The Bell Curve” was the turning point, the eugenics kind of book. I used to think it was because he was wanted to believe there was a gene for everything and you could fix everything. But I just don’t know. I do not know.
Bosch: And you mentioned how damaging it was, and of course it was so damaging his point of view, especially about Black people, because he was a giant of the field. You know, he did establish this field, he did win the Nobel, and so he ends up sort of giving cover to people with these beliefs, right?
Hopkins: That’s what’s so terrifying about it. I was so worried that he would do this publicly. Say it about women, say it about Blacks. I remember when he did I thought, “Oh no.” Yes, it gives credibility to something which we fought for so long. It seems you can’t kill eugenics, it just won’t go away. I don’t know why it is. But I have no idea what happened. Very sad.
Bosch: You’ve known a lot of incredibly smart people. You are an incredibly smart person. People can’t see, but you’re making a very funny face.
Hopkins: Oh, they can’t see my face. Well that’s just as well.
Bosch: What do you think about this idea of the “Nobel disease,” that sometimes very smart people end up falling for these very non-scientific ideas or unscientific ideas?
Lab strips James Watson of final honorary roles after his continuing racist statements
Hopkins: I’ve not heard that. That he would fall for something unscientific makes me think it was a real illness, like dementia of some kind. I don’t know about that. One of the things that was so remarkable about Jim when I knew him, he already had a Nobel Prize, remember.
But he always was looking, as I say, for talent. He thought that the dishwasher could be the smartest person in our group. We don’t know. So when he was young, saying these outrageous things, they were directed against the establishment. He was all for young people like himself, finding those bright people who were fighting against the dumb establishment who didn’t get it, and supporting them. That was he was all about. And that was the basis of his success going out and finding Wally Gilbert and Mark Ptashne and so forth, Joan Steitz. Of course, I guess if you have power, the kind of power he had and people are afraid to tell you when you’re wrong. Maybe, but I really think this was so uncharacteristic and so ridiculous, such unscientific. I mean he had made scientific errors, for sure, he’d been wrong about things, and partly because he followed his gut. If something was wrong, he would drop it faster than anybody else. He would say, “It’s wrong. Gotta get rid of it.” He wanted facts, he wanted truth, he wanted reality. So I just don’t know. I can’t make sense of it.
Bosch: How do you want people to remember him, or for young people to learn about him?
Hopkins: Well, this is, I think, the thing that’s I think been hardest for me this week. Another generation comes along and some of the things that he said and did, the women or whatever, they can’t believe people did these things or said these things and I get it. And it’s wonderful that the culture has changed. The magnitude of what he accomplished scientifically is, it’s like you’re talking to Einstein. We’re talking about Einstein, really. And how can we balance these things? To be around him was the privilege of anybody who had the opportunity. You know, we were there at a moment in history, of scientific history, it was thrilling. And he didn’t just do that one thing, that one big monumental thing, and walk away. He stayed and founded the field. He didn’t do his own experiments and take the credit for them. He wrote the textbook. He founded the [department] at Harvard, then he went off and founded Cold Spring Harbor, then he did the Genome Project. I mean, he just didn’t … if you’d done one of those things, you would have had a good career. And he created the whole field of modern biology and changed the world. And people, the number of people who benefit from the discoveries that go out of it is all of us.
So how do you balance those? And I think it’s a question for the whole society. How do we balance those two things? That’s your generation has to solve that problem. We haven’t we don’t know the answer really. I don’t know it. I’m asking you.
Bosch: Oh gosh, I’m just an editor, so I just try to make other people’s thoughts a little bit sharper.
Hopkins: You are doing exactly the right thing. This is a topic we need to talk about because we don’t want cancel culture. None of us do. And we’re seeing it from the left and we’re seeing it from the right. We don’t want it. How do you but how do you deal with it? There are some things that are just unacceptable, but their contributions so enormous that does the world so much good. And how do we think about [it when] they’re both true in a way?
Bosch: And I mean that’s what I enjoy about hearing you talk about him is your acknowledgement of both the brilliance and your acknowledgement of where things really went wrong. And so I think it’s admirable. Lots of us have trouble seeing both sides of our friends that way.
Hopkins: Remarkable man, a genius, a true genius, a giant and with flaws that we can’t understand.
Bosch: I think that’s a great place to end unless there’s anything else that you would like people to think or know about Jim.
Hopkins: I think that covered it very well. Appreciate it.
Bosch: Nancy Hopkins, thank you so much for coming on the First Opinion Podcast.
And thank you for listening to the First Opinion Podcast. It’s produced by Hyacinth Empinado. Alyssa Ambrose is the senior producer, and Rick Berke is the executive producer. And you can share your opinion about the show by emailing me at first.opinion at statnews.com. And please leave a review or rating on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Torie Bosch, and please don’t keep your opinions to yourself.
