Nobel laureate Professor James Watson is due to encounter a silent protest when he returns to Clare College this Tuesday.

Professor Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1953 for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, will be giving a talk entitled “Rules for Doing Science”.

However, despite his high status at the College – he is an Honorary Fellow and his achievements are celebrated by a double helix sculpture in the College’s Memorial Court – a group of students are planning to hold a silent protest on his arrival because of his controversial opinions.

Clare undergraduate Ed Bentsi-Enchill, who is organising the protest, said: “This is a man who does not reflect Clare’s ideals of inclusiveness and diversity and should not be allowed to speak at the College.”

Senior Tutor Dr Patricia Fara disagreed: “Professor Watson is an internationally distinguished scientist: in my opinion, the fact that he has expressed some views that you disagree with is not a good reason for encouraging others to boycott every occasion at which he appears.”

Professor Watson and his co-workers’ achievements have been described by fellow Nobel laureates as the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century. However, he is certainly no stranger to criticism, especially for his controversial ideas.

In 1990, the journal Science wrote: “To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script.”

His notorious remarks have included the hypothesis that black people have stronger libidos, that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could show that it would be homosexual, and that beauty one day could be genetically manufactured, adding: “People say it would be terribly if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

Perhaps most infamously, in an interview with The Sunday Times in 2007, he said that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

For these remarks, Professor Watson was fired from his post at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island.

Professor Watson will be commencing his talk at 5.30pm in the Gillespie Centre at Clare, and the silent protest will start outside at 5pm. An interview with the professor will be in this week's Varsity.