James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and one of the most talented and distinguished living scientists in the world, got himself into a furore this week. In an interview in the Sunday Times magazine, he argued that Africa would remain forever underdeveloped, on account of the supposed inferior intelligence of the African population.

Watson’s statement was a travesty of science. However, the reaction to his statement has been a travesty, too. The Nobel Prize winner should have been criticised by fellow scientists, countered in peer-reviewed journals, or simply dismissed professionally as a once-great has-been that has not been at the forefront of biology for decades.

Instead, he has been suspended from his job at a laboratory in New York, forced to cancel his speaking tour (including at the Science Museum in South Kensington tonight), and had his reputation torn to pieces in public without debate or discussion.

A range of scientific opinion came down on him in public like a tonne of bricks, including the Federation of American Scientists, which called his comments ‘noxious’. However, surely the most noxious of the statements was by the Science Museum, which asserted that Watson’s comments were ‘beyond the point of acceptable debate’.

To assert that any scientific opinion is not open to debate is an affront to both scientific and social principles. The scientific method demands the advance of statements that may be right or wrong, their debate, and their test. It the statement is correct, it will victor in the debate, and be proven by the tests. If the statement is incorrect, it will be defeated in the debate, and disproven by the tests. However, to argue that a statement cannot be debated, for reasons of political correctness, runs fundamentally counter to the idea of scientific discovery.

To throw away these principles takes us out of the Enlightenment, and throws us back into the Inquisition: when certain scientific ideas, such as the Earth daring to revolve around the Sun, were deemed so politically unappetising, that any scientist that proposed them was soon brutally murdered.

There are a number of scientific issues that have been settled through a process of political ostracism: either promoted by the political-scientific ‘consensus’ (the anthropogenic theory of global warming being the most prominent) or opposed by it (as Watson’s is).

Regardless of one’s position in the scientific debate, there can be only one position to hold in the political one. The over-reaction means only that free speech is denied, that minority opinions are unheard, and that reason is held subservient to convenience, presenting a critical threat: not just to our scientific future, but to our political one, too.