An
8 and a half-hour erection
He gave the case history of a man who was given quantities of melanin
which turned his skin dark: the sexual connection with pigment
was so strong that he he had an 8 and a half-hour erection! And life has
never been the same for him.
Watson went on to
talk bracingly about being slightly overweight, referring jovially
to his own paunch as he did so. People talk of hearty big people being
'jolly'. Certainly, in the African tradition, the combination of sun and
sexuality is obvious. And having body fat indicates prosperity and fecundity.
Of course blonde people are often sexually attractive, but especially
so when they are tanned and curvy...
At this point there was a genuine frisson in the audience. A leading scientist,
one of the world's great geneticists, began showing how the compulsion
to be thin was not just harmful, it was ugly. He referred to Karen
Carpenter, the singer who died of anorexia. He showed slides of models.
Thin, thin, thin, and in his terms horrible, to be contrasted sharply
with the contented, sexy, rounded figures as painted by Rubens.
Here there were gasps.
He referred to the fact that fashion designers tended to like thin women,
because so many of them were actually not sexually interested in those
models, or in any women for that matter!
He then mused about the fact that people who are thin, being unhappy,
have only one way to get themselves to feel good, is to run. Then
the endorphins kick in, and the thin people feel as good as the people
who are being made to feel good by being overweight. 'Thin people like
to run', he said. A thin couch potato won't work conceptually, thin people
have to belong to health clubs. Runners are happy. Again Watson's musings
led him to make the audience catch a collective breath: he wondered whether
a fox at the end of the hunt 'dies happy'. Few people in his audience
would have been in favour of fox-hunting, nor would they have found any
reference to that practice especially amusing.
As he carried on towards his conclusion, the Nobel prizewinner's ideas
came faster, and, in some senses at least, thicker. He referred to leeches
being happy when they are full. He suggested that obese Americans are
happy. He didn't quite sing it, but he did say, 'Let the sun shine in'.
He also said 'Roll on global warming'. At one stage he referred to Greenpeace,
simply saying 'They're unhappy'.
If his explanation is not right, he said, someone should come up with another.
He certainly was
amusing at times, although not all the time. Some leading scientists took
advantage of the heat, the sun, their sense of fat well-being
encouraged them to snore rather than get sexy.
After some bemused questions and some bemusing answers, the Nobel Prizewinner, whose work made history stopped talking.
His microphone was detached and, like the human being to which it had only recently been affixed, at last lost its plug.
1
Watson and Crick Case Study J. D. WATSON and F. H. C. CRICK Nature, 2
April 1953, VOL 171,737 1953 Commentary by Tom Zinnen For best use of
this case study, please download the original from the "Naturepast" web
area of www.nature.com.
2 CiberfascÌculos "Grandes CientÌficos del siglo XX" - Watson y Crick
De la cadena de descubrimientos a la doble hÈlice Linus Pauling, quÌmico
y fÌsico estadounidense, comenzÛ a trabajar sobre cuestiones relacionadas
con la bioquÌmica en la dÈcada de los 30. Bas·ndose en el estudio por
rayos X y en el uso de modelos
3 Base Pairing in DNA: The Watson-Crick Model THE
WATSON-CRICK MODEL BASE-PAIRING IN DNA Experiments have shown that
DNA samples taken from different cells of the same species have the same
proportions of the four bases.
4 Watson & Crick in the Cavendish Lab Slide 1 of 8
5 Watson & Crick with their famous model Slide 8 of 8
6 CiberfascÌculos "Grandes CientÌficos del siglo XX" - Watson y Crick
Por Javier S·ez Castresana Elena Sanz Dos hombres... y un sÛlo destino
Francis Harry Cropton Crick naciÛ en 1916 en Northampton, Inglaterra.
Doce aÒos despuÈs, Jean Mitchell daba a luz a James Dewey Watson en Chicago
(EE.UU.). Dos hombres bien
7 Francis Crick and James Watson and the building blocks of life (in MARION) Author: Edelson, Edward, 1932- Published: New York : Oxford University
Press, c1998. Subject: Watson
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