Scientific pedigrees are like any genealogical tree: When shaken, they can reveal family secrets. Most often, academic connections are divulged informally; potential employers want to know who you published with and who they can call to get a personal reference. But sometimes they reveal much more.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT C. Brandon Ogbunu is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University and a computational biologist interested in disease.

My career began as a research assistant in the laboratory of Susan Gottesman at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD. A pioneering microbiologist, Gottesman is best known for her foundational work in bacterial gene regulation. Early in her own career, however, Gottesman was an undergraduate research assistant in the lab of James Watson, the famed co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA. In effect—through his direct connection to Gottesman and because Watson’s work helped establish my fields of study—James Watson can be considered my academic ancestor.

While Watson has always been a curious character, it wasn’t until 2007 that his personality caught up to his mythology. That year he made comments about, among other things, the dim prospects for the continent of Africa and its descendants, a fate he attributed to inferior intelligence. Shortly afterwards, he issued an apology, telling the Associated Press, “There is no scientific basis for such a belief." But earlier this month, he doubled down on this sentiment during the PBS documentary American Masters: Decoding Watson. His comments led Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the renowned research institution that Watson has been long associated with, to strip him of his honorary titles.

That one person separates me, an African-American computational biologist, from James Watson—Nobel Laureate and mouthpiece of racist opinions—presents a quandary. For years, I have reveled in the powers of DNA, yet one of the people most associated with its discovery has made abhorrent comments about my race. The dilemma raises several questions: How does it feel to be a black scientist who owes much to James Watson in general, and in my case, is linked to his specific pedigree? Is it much ado about nothing, or might the black scientist occupy a special place in modern conversations about scientific racism?

Ironically, I was introduced to the scientific legacy of James Watson by my mother, an African-American woman raised in west Baltimore in the 1940s and ’50s, the granddaughter of a woman born in North Carolina near the time of emancipation. That my mother would have been a scientist under different circumstances is a good guess, and I inherited her love of mathematics and adoration for scientists. Her copy of Watson’s The Double Helix shared the same bookshelf with the works of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. She spoke glowingly of the DNA structure discovery and emphasized that teamwork and perseverance can solve some of the world’s biggest problems. I mostly listened. I applied that belief to my graduate work in evolutionary biology, a field that was transformed by genomics (an outcome that Watson predicted with impressive prescience).

James Watson is a DNA enthusiast. Not only is this stance understandable, it isn’t controversial, and many people who are not scientific racists are also DNA enthusiasts. (I might even be described as such.) The question of whether the biological basis of complex life is about genes or the environment is partly an empirical one. And (spoiler alert) thus far we know that genes can authoritatively craft the raw material of many morphological, behavioral, and disease-associated traits. Other explanations for the basis of life are at least as eminent, and not necessarily in conflict with the centrality of DNA—history, context, and environment turn the knobs on how genes are built, how they do their job, and how traits manifest in a dynamic world.

These are fascinating and important questions that James Watson might be interested in. The problem is that his controversial claims about black people do not grapple with those questions. Watson is not in the news for being interested in the genes associated with educational attainment. He is not radioactive for suggesting that the color you paint your toddler’s bedroom won’t make them more creative adults. Watson was stripped of his titles not for talking about group differences but because his comments displayed a reckless misuse of science.