STUPIDITY is a genetic disease that science should be striving to cure, one of the researchers who unravelled the structure of DNA has claimed on the 50th anniversary of the breakthrough.

People of low intelligence who do not have a recognised mental disability are suffering from an inherited disorder as real as cystic fibrosis or haemophilia, according to James Watson, the biologist who won the Nobel prize for his role in the discovery.

While most people blame learning difficulties on poverty or broken homes, the true cause of poor intelligence and achievement is more likely to be genetic, Dr Watson said. This could and should eventually be corrected, and molecular biologists have a duty to identify the genes that affect low intelligence and to develop gene therapies or pre-natal screening tests to prevent it.

“If you really are stupid, I would call that a disease,” Dr Watson said. “The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent.

“It seems unfair that some people don’t get the same opportunity. Once you have a way in which you can improve our children, no one can stop it. It would be stupid not to use it because someone else will. Those parents who enhance their children, then their children are going to be the ones who dominate the world.” Genes that influence beauty could also be engineered. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

Dr Watson, 75, president of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York, founded the Human Genome Project, the international effort to map mankind’s genetic code. His remarks have stirred fresh controversy about the future of genetics as the scientific world begins two months of celebrations to mark 50 years since his landmark research.

He is an outspoken advocate of using genetic technology to improve the human race, and is often accused of espousing eugenics. He has a son who suffers from a cognitive disorder similar to autism, whom he rarely discusses in public, but whose condition he says has influenced his views.

Scientists and ethicists questioned both the scientific plausibility and moral basis of Dr Watson’s comments, which were made in DNA, a Channel 4 documentary series.

Oliver James, a clinical psychologist and author of They F*** You Up, accused Dr Watson of “ropey thinking” about the balance between nature and nurture. “First, this is so far away as to be science fiction, so it’s stupid to be talking about it now. Anyway, it’s very far from clear that intelligence is fixed in this way,” he said.

Tom Shakespeare, a bioethics expert at the University of Newcastle, said: “He is talking about altering something that most people see as part of normal human variation, and that, I think, is wrong. What staggers me also is that he’s meant to be a geneticist, but he doesn’t appreciate the complexity of the thousands of genes, interrelated particular contexts in the environment, that produce the phenotype intelligence . . . It seems to me that he either was a brilliant scientist or a lucky scientist . . . I’m afraid he may have done more harm than good, his leadership of the Human Genome Project and his discovery of 1953 notwithstanding.”

Sir John Sulston, who ran Britain’s contribution to the Human Genome Project, said Dr Watson was exploring an “extremely dangerous area”, but was not wrong to speak out. “It is foolish to put our heads in the sand,” he said.

DNA begins on Saturday March 8 at 7pm on Channel 4.

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