Race remarks by Nobel Prize winner

A London Museum canceled a lecture by Nobel Prize winning geneticist James Watson because of comments he made about African and European intelligence.

Watson was published in the Sunday Times, 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."

He also told the paper he hoped everyone was equal, but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

This comment is not the first shock statement from the 79-year-old American. In 2000, Watson awed an audience at the University of California, Berkeley, when he advanced a theory the correlation between skin color and sex drive.

The lecture, which included images of women wearing bikinis, argued that extracts of melanin - which gives skin its color - has been shown to boost sex drive.

That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."

Watson co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."

Watson, who serves as chancellor of the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., was to deliver a sold-out lecture at the Science Museum, but on Wednesday night the institution said Watson's comments had gone too far and the event had been canceled.