At the age of 79, he had published his autobiography Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science and when interviewed by a journalist on his international book tour, James Watson casually suggested the possibility that black Africans might be less intelligent than other groups. ...As a result of those brief and speculative remarks, the man hitherto often ranked as the world's greatest living scientist was massively demonized and stripped of many of his accumulated honors and positions, even including his honorary emeritus status at the scientific laboratory whose national reputation he himself had almost singlehandedly created. Watson was widely presented as a vile, even depraved individual, and although he was not physically burned at the stake, in many other respects his fate resembled what would have befallen anyone expressing sympathy for Lucifer in the Old Salem of our 17th century Massachusetts Bay colony