NEW YORK, Oct 19: A US Nobel Prize winning scientist has been suspended from his administrative duties as chancellor of a New York lab after reportedly saying black people were less intelligent than whites.

“The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Board of Trustees decided to suspend the administrative responsibilities of Chancellor James D. Watson, PhD, pending further deliberation by the board,” the lab said in a statement.

Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962 for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, was in London for a book tour when an interview he gave to the Sunday Times sparked a furore.

The lab said in its statement that Waton’s suspension “follows after the board’s public statement on Thursday disagreeing with the comments attributed to Dr Watson in the Oct 14 edition of The Sunday Times.”

Those comments were Watson’s “own personal statements and in no way reflect the mission, goals, or principles of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Board, administration or faculty,” lab president Bruce Still-man added in a separate statement.

“Dr. Watson is not the president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and was not speaking on behalf of the institution,” he said.

“The Board of Trustees, administration and faculty vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments.

“Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson,” Stillman added.

Watson told the British weekly that 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.”—AFP