'Race row' Nobel winner suspended LONDON, England (CNN) -- Nobel laureate biologist James Watson was suspended Friday from his longtime post at a research laboratory and canceled his planned British book tour after controversial comments that black people are not as intelligent as white people.
James Watson won the 1962 Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA.
Watson has apologized for the controversial remarks.
He failed to appear to a book signing at a London bookshop Friday afternoon, and organizers of his planned Sunday evening talk at Newcastle's Center for Life said they had been informed Watson would not appear because he was already on a flight home to the States.
The board of trustees at New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which Watson has led for nearly four decades, said they had suspended his administrative responsibilities pending a review of his comments.
Watson, 79, an American who won the 1962 Nobel prize for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, apologized Thursday for his remarks -- but not before London's Science Museum canceled his talk there, planned for Friday evening.
The museum said Watson's words had "gone beyond the point of acceptable debate."
The controvery began with an October 14 interview Watson gave to the Sunday Times, which quoted him saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."
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."
The biologist apologized "unreservedly" Thursday for his comments and said he was "mortified" by the words attributed to him.
"I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said," Watson said during an appearance at the Royal Society in London. "I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways that they have."
"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."
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http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/10/19/uk.race/index.html