In honor of one of my favorite places on the planet, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, I am trying to distract some of the negative attention that has come from James Watson’s latest choice of words. So I am calling on everyone in the community to come up with recommendations for whose genome Roche should sequence with the 454 technology to make up for the fact that they did Watson’s genome. And it would be good if the pick was someone that would make Watson a bit queasy.
Here are my top picks
- Condoleezza Rice. An absurdly powerful, smart, black woman.
- Francis Crick. Someone has to have some of his hair somewhere.
- Rosalind Franklin. Not sure about the hair. But wouldn’t it be great if she was one of the reference genomes.
- Francis Collins. Apparently no love lost between Francis and Jim.
- Craig Venter. Sure his genome has been nearly completed. But why not do it again with another method.
Any other suggestions that would stick in Watson’s craw?
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
How about Maya Keyes (right-winger Alan Keyes’ daughter)? An intelligent, black, female homosexual? That should hit all the right buttons.
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My vote goes to Franklin, if it’s at all possible. I reckon that would really choke Watson, but more importantly, it would be a fine gesture.
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Raymond Gosling is still alive, he was Franklin’s co-worker at King’s college
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Franklin’s would be fun since one of Watson’s other recent insane ramblings was that she was autistic. Could spite him by sequencing her genome, and definitely/probably/possibly refute that claim as well 😛
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Franklin. Definitely.As long as he isn’t able to splice in any autism genes into the consensus sequence to spite her.
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Bernadine Healy!
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I’d like to see Bill Clinton’s. And Hilary’s. Oh, and has anyone compared yet Watson’s and Venter’s genomes? Is the latter public, too? Probably they both hired a postdoc already to do it 🙂
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CityKittyNot sure if Watsons is public yet … nor if anyone has formally compared it to Venter’s but that would be kind of fun
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I say Darwin. There’s got to be a strand of hair lying around somewhere… Sounds like a great PhD project.
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