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Disappointed by James Watson’s decision to sell his Nobel Prize medal, Lior Pachter, a computational biologist who works on genomics at the University of California Berkeley, wrote an entry on his private blog in early December protesting the decision.
To criticize Watson’s infamous positions on race (among other things), Pachter turned to the recent human genome data, mostly derived from SNPedia, a resource that lists various genetic mutations discovered from the 1000Genomes project. In what he called a “thought experiment,” Pachter looked at all the mutations in the database, noting the ones with beneficial and disadvantageous effects. His argument: the person with the most “good” alleles and the least “bad” alleles would be the “perfect human.” It just happened that the sample closest to this arbitrary constructed ideal came from a Puerto Rican woman.
Pachter was happy that the “perfect human” did not turn out to be of Irish or Scottish background, fearing that such a finding would give ammunition to racists. In fact, his post was intended to be sarcastic, with a tongue-in-cheek tone that ridiculed...