A few encounters with James Watson

After the Nobel laureate James Watson died on November 6th, I solicited from Bluesky any stories that anyone had about run-ins with Watson. He had a decades-long career in biology, first in co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, then running the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York for decades. Here are a few anonymous stories:

1. "If you would like to cite an anonymous source, my favorite Watson anecdote is that at my first [Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory] conference, I heard a bunch of [principle investigators] talking about how he used to play "the Jew game" where he would go around the table and try to guess everyone's Ashkenazi ancestry %."
2. "During my miserable postdoc year there, someone (don't remember who, but I was a neuroscience postdoc fwiw) told me that he had been contacted by the Nobel committee about a prize for Barbara McClintock and he told them not to give it to her."
   1. Ed: Barbra McClintock was a geneticist who discovered transposons, genes that move around of their volition outside the control of their host cell. She made this discovery in the 1940s before anyone knew what genes were. She famously was made to wait more than 40 years before receiving the Nobel Prize.
3. "Hi Dan, my James Watson story is probably not rare: I attended a conference at CSH in 1989 or 1990 and Watson showed up at the conference dinner / keynote and sat near the door checking out all the female scientists. He spent a good 30 seconds staring directly at my boobs while talking to my advisor. I was 22 at the time. CREEPY."
4. "Hello! I would prefer to keep it anonymous, but here are the stories I've heard about Watson. The first I heard from someone who worked as a tech at [Cold Spring Harbor] when they had a celebration for the 40th anniversary of the publication of the DNA structure. When [Francis] Crick spoke, he went on at length about how essential [Rosalind] Franklin's work was, and how she deserved to have shared the Nobel prize. When Watson gave his presentation, and he got the slide about Franklin, all he said little other than that she had been prettier than the photo used for the slide, and then moved on."
   1. "The second is less well sourced - I didn't hear it from anyone directly involved, it was just a story going around among grad students at Harvard circa 2015. Supposedly, when he was still at Harvard and had foreign grad students and postdocs, he would hang a photocopy of their immigration paperwork over their desk or lab bench as a reminder of the power he held over them."