You'd think James Watson would be pretty good at apologizing by now. Last October, the then 79-year-old Nobel Prize winner was quoted in the Sunday Times of London Magazine as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" given that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."

Watson formally apologized for the comments, which he denied having made, and resigned on October 25th—11 days after the incendiary comments appeared—as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

It was hardly the first time Watson was quoted saying something awkward since he and his colleagues Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the double helical structure of DNA. He'd been slammed for ignoring the contribution of biophysicist Rosalind Franklin in solving DNA's structure; for picking on Franklin's appearance; for saying that women might want to abort babies with "gay genes"; and on and on.

It was with all that in mind that I went to New York University on Wednesday afternoon to see Watson give a talk about his latest book, "Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science," which, if it's anything like the talk, is part memoir, part Dale Carnegie-style distillation of a lifetime's wisdom. (Among Watson's maxims: Don't be a hypocrite for the sake of social acceptance.)

NYU was surely less leery of Watson than Columbia University had been of Iranian president and Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he visited the latter school's campus in September. But Tamar Schlick, a co-organizer of the talk and professor in chemistry, mathematics and computer science at NYU, nodded when asked if the she and her co-hosts had been worried that their guest would say something inflammatory.

"Yeah," she said, "we worked very hard in conference calls" with Watson's people. She wouldn't elaborate much. "Some people had doubts whether he apologized or not," she said. "I didn't want anybody to be offended, so I wanted him to apologize before he began his remarks."

Watson seemed to be in good spirits. His 80th birthday had passed on April 6th (a reception would follow the talk), and on the 16th the journal Nature published his full genome sequence. The first thing he did was encourage the NYU crowd to speak up if he mumbled but to hold any disagreements for at least 10 minutes. (He punctuated his remarks frequently with a dry, lisplike cackle.)

Then he got right to it, explaining that he wanted to "indicate my own horror about the remarks I reputedly made in the London Sunday Times, which, when I read them, I would clearly hate the person who made them." He continued: "I certainly have never believed that one, you know, group of people is better than another." Then he made a strange remark that he's "always been aware that I'm not very good as a mathematician."

Next he cited the "particular[ly] awful couple of sentences" from the Times in which he seemed to imply that "my black colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor weren't doing their job well." The passage in question quoted Watson as saying he hoped everyone was equal, but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

He told the audience at NYU: "We have only two black students at the Watson School [of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor], both girls, both very spunky and, I think, very good. And my secretary for 10 years was a black woman until she decided that she wanted to help her husband. So I've worked with people of all sorts of races."

At times, he continued, "people have said I was anti-women and anti-Semitic and anti-fat people," which he said made him sound like "someone from Chicago, filled with sort of extreme remarks." (He was born in Chicago in 1927 and raised there.)

But "thinking back, to haunt me the worst was [a headline in] the London Times about 10 years ago"—he meant The Telegraph—"that said 'Abort [mumbled—Ed.] babies: Nobel Prize winner.'" The headline in The Telegraph's archives reads "Abort babies with gay genes, says Nobel winner." (The word Watson mumbled sounded closest to "hobo.") That incident, Watson said, had been "really grim. But I was just arguing for women's freedom to, you know—whatever sort of child they want, let 'em have." Nonetheless, "it got quoted, and it was a pretty awful weekend for me. And this other case was much worse and I'm mortified, and I've apologized."

He then noted that Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, head of the "Afro-American" department at Harvard University, had interviewed him for an hour and a half for a webcast that must have had to do with DNA ancestry tests, because Watson explained that DNA "offers a real way to find out where you came from."

He suggested that a person's genome would be informative but limited. "I put my sequence on the Web," he said, "and someone from Iceland"—he's referring to Kari Stefansson, CEO of deCODE Genetics—"said I'm 16 percent black and seven percent Asian. And you know I can sort of imagine a scenario by which some of my ancestors had African blood in them."

But he said he found it "very hard" to see the Asian connection. "You know the railroads hardly crossed by the time my Irish grandmother was born," he said, apparently referring to the U.S. transcontinental railroad. "I think we're all just curious about where we come from," he said.

Thus ended the meat of the apology. The remainder of his hour-long talk was In discussing the importance of social skills to a biologist's career, he said that Rosalind Franklin probably had Asperger's syndrome and had lost out on the Nobel in part because she was so socially awkward.

During a brief Q&A, he confirmed that he contributed to Barack Obama's presidential campaign ($2300 in January). "I really want Obama to win," but he said he would back John McCain over Hilary Clinton ("Hilary—whoo," were his exact words) because McCain would be a stauncher advocate of science. Clinton, he said, "actually believes social science is as good as science."

He then outlined his foreign policy: "All this business of worrying about the world," he said. "If I had Bill Gates's money, I would spend it in the United States." He suggested that a doubling of the U.S. science budget might ease his concerns that the country—the one he "grew up wanting to believe ... was the best place in the world"—was currently "sinking."

At the reception following the talk, I watched Watson step over an ottoman to reach the birthday cake Schlick was cutting cut for him. Kiwi slices were laid on top of chocolate icing in the shape of a vague double helix.

Later, I asked Schlick how she thought the apology had come off. "It's not for me to decide," she said. "There are a lot of things I would not have said. That's all I can say."