This profile of W. French Anderson really needs some editing. Lots of editing. It’s about 4500 words long, and most of it is self-serviing puffery — we learn how highly he thinks of himself, how tough he is, that he recently aced his driving test, how he won a high school debate in 1951, and how he did some ambitious science in the 80s and 90s, but he’s unimpressed by this CRISPR stuff. The arrogance just oozes through the page, which I guess is one virtue of the article, but still it is tediously long. If I were editing it, I’d cut it down to less than 250 words. Here are the salient words; the rest is just noise.
But in July 2006, Anderson was convicted of three counts of lewd acts on a child and one count of continuous sexual abuse, including fondling her genitals. The sexual assaults started in 1997 when the girl was 10 and Anderson was 60, prosecutors said, and lasted until 2001 — abuse that his victim testified in court caused her “pain that led me to cut my own body and contemplate suicide.” Her mother ran Anderson’s lab, and he had mentored the child academically and in karate.
Before sentencing Anderson to 14 years in prison, Judge Michael Pastor said he had caused the girl “incalculable” emotional damage: “Because of intellectual arrogance, he persisted and he got away with as much as he could.”
…
It was not only the audiotape but also emails that helped convict Anderson. In response to the girl’s emailed request for an apology, for instance, he wrote that he “can understand what would drive a person to suicide. For me, a powerful 9-mm bullet through the head would be the way to go” and “just in case, I have bought the ammunition.” In another email, he wrote that he “came to the sad conclusion that there must be a very bad part of me that, now that I have recognized it, has to be permanently suppressed.”
OK, actually we could have ended it with the first paragraph. It’s enough. I’m indulging the writer.
Instead of hearing all that glurge about W. French Anderson’s grand scientific dreams stunted by his ten years in prison, the real story ought to have been about the cost and loss of opportunity to his victim, and to his victim’s mother, who was sufficiently qualified scientifically to run his lab. There’s the real loss to science, not the absence of an egotistical pedophile.
But we don’t hear their story, because they refused to be interviewed for this article. That ought to have told the author and her editors that maybe this is a story they should have shredded. W. French Anderson has had his decades in the spotlight. It’s past time to let him go.
This lionizing of awful white men has to stop.
I dunno, gijoel. I think if a few of those awful white men were fed to the lions, the world would be better for it.
Also the sealionizing.
Yeah, the overwhelming image I got from reading that piece is that Anderson is a rampant narcissist with zero empathy for the girl he was convicted of abusing.
Wait, he’s pooh-poohing CRISPR? No sympathy at all.
Just further proof that the powerful never truly apologize for their bad acts – instead, they frame everything in “pity me now that I’ve been forced to acknowledge it”. R. Kelly releasing “I Admit”, a song in which he counters every accusation against him with “I’m rich, I’m famous, and I used to be a victim too” just seems too synchronous.
Thanks for this one, PZ. Sharon Begley is usually pretty good. Maybe she was pressured into doing this. When I read it, I got the vague sense that she was deniably encouraging a critical response. I sincerely hope that she just wanted an expenses-paid vacation.
What is statnews in the first place? Every story on that site seems to be click-bait or worse.
andrewglasgow@5–
Yeah, I think it’s further evidence of Anderson’s narcissism. He pooh-poohs CRISPR despite it being the biggest leap in genetic technology since PCR, and the only reason I can think that he would be so dismissive is because he had no role in developing it.
petesh@7–
I don’t think the article is bad journalism as such, just rather pointless. I suspect Begley was aiming for one of those nuanced New-Yorker-style criminal review stories, but unfortunately chose a story where there really isn’t much nuance. There’s always some interest in a Great Person Destroyed By Their Flaws story, the old hubris/nemesis, but there’s not much to this story other than that he was involved in important research and was convicted of a terrible crime. In classic dramatic structure, the nemesis follows from the hubris, but there’s really no arc between being a scientist and being a sexual predator. Really, it could just as easily be about a race car driver who was also a tax fraud, or a high-ranking ambassador who had a drinking problem, or any other [insert praiseworthy achievement] linked to any other [insert personal failing].
And if there was an arc here to be drawn out from Anderson’s particular history, Begley made it impossible to examine given her pre-determined restriction of not assessing his claims of innocence…which I fully understand from the point of view of not wanting to engage with any self-serving story-spinning, but it also took away any chance of writing anything perceptive about his story.
@10 chrislawson: I think the point was buried, and I also agree that it did not deserve 4500 words unless there was a well-drawn connection between his selfish abuse and utterly self-righteous protestations of innocence and his approach to science and regulation; some good science and an absolute certainty that he knew best, ethics be damned. We’re on the same page; you call the journalism pointless, I call it poor.