Alex Bates was lying on her couch on a Friday afternoon when her phone began blowing up. It was a moment she and her colleagues had spent years preparing for: James Watson had died. When she joined the National Human Genome Research Institute in 2019 as the head of its communications office, how the agency should discuss its former director — an icon of biology for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA — was one of the first things she was charged with tackling.

Tucked away on a government server were drafts of opinion pieces, talking points its scientists could make in interviews, and a statement from the agency’s director. This elaborate PR campaign was prepared for two reasons: Watson had been a powerful advocate for the Human Genome Project and its first director, and was, quite literally, the reason NHGRI existed. But Watson’s unrepentant beliefs in scientific racism and sexism, which had poisoned his own legacy, wouldn’t die with him. If anything, they were making a comeback.

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Even before President Trump’s return to power illuminated a new wave of racist, anti-immigrant, transphobic sentiments, eugenic ideas and rhetoric had been ramping up in the U.S., driven by anxieties about low birth rates and the arrival of genetic technologies that promise prospective parents new powers of offspring “optimization.” Amid this resurgence, NHGRI’s leadership had taken a public stance against scientific racism and eugenics — driven by the technologies’ dubious evidence and ethics, and their potential to discourage historically marginalized groups from participating in genomics research, threatening the future of personalized medicine.

But when Watson died in November at age 97, NHGRI did not put out any of the materials Bates and her team had prepared. There was no one left in its communication office to do that. Bates and everyone who had worked there, along with the entirety of NHGRI’s education and outreach offices, had been fired months before as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restructure the federal government.