Your father peaked as a graduate student? Man, that's rough.
He did plenty of important stuff and continues to do so (he's already discovered a cure for Alzheimers, at least it works in the mice models), but I'm pretty sure that the paper he wrote about sequencing one of the most important vectors for cloning is still his most cited work. He claims to have seen one of the diagrams from the paper taped to lab benches the whole world over.
Since you keep talking about it, what's your fathers name - if he's such an important figure in microbiology and genetics research, permanently cemented at the top, surely he's recognizable? Surely you're not talking about Sanger? Maxam? Gilbert? You're being super vague here, and it's funny because there's no 'central paper cited by everyone in micro/molecular' for the first plasmid sequence technique, just like no one cites Mullis in their PCR methodology section. Biology has, as you said, 'moved on'.
I'm being deliberately vague because I'm not interested in doxxing myself, and if you do put two and two together and figure out who he is, I would respectfully request that you not broadcast it on this website. I will tell you that he was closely associated with at least one of the people you mentioned. The vector that he sequenced is sometimes described as "the vector of vectors" and is one of the most widely used vectors in genetic engineering. As such, it's sequence it of tremendous interest and that is why his work of sequencing it continues to be cited.
What you've written here is evidence that you do not understand the claim being made. I'm serious, I'm going to repeat this - You have misunderstood the claim I am making, and are straw manning me yet again. I want you to reread what I have written in the OP, because I never wrote anything about interrelatedness.
You claimed that "more genetic variation exists due to randomness between any two random humans than exists as a result of racial groupings". I am willing to concede that that statement is not functionally identical to the statement that "because most genetic variation occurs within races, two random individuals from different races may be genetically closer than two random individuals from the same race." However, that claim is made in the paper that you linked to (which looks to be a cherry-picked meta-analysis) to support Lewontin's statement. The study linked to in Razib Khan's article was far more exhaustive than the study that you linked to, and it plainly refutes some of the claims made by Witherspoon, et al. As such, I have to conclude that Witherspoon, et al were motivated by ideological bias and were not really interested in attempting to falsify Lewontin's hypothesis.
In any case, I may have read too much into your statement by assuming that you agreed with the conclusion of the paper you linked to (not a far fetched assumption in my opinion), but I apologize for making such an assumption if it was not justified and you do not actually agree with the faulty conclusion of Witherspoon, et al.
And friendo, I highly suggest you read the entire op-ed article you linked. Not surprisingly, this isn't the first time in this conversation you've misread the articles you're trying to link as proof. Razib Khan writing what he does doesn't mean he's shattering the status quo, just like John Horgan writing a sarcastic piece about censorship doesn't mean scientists are banning research on this stuff.
Horgan's piece wasn't sarcastic. His original clarification was sarcastic, then he clarified his clarification by stating, "So what do I really mean by a ban? Here's one possibility. Institutional review boards (IRBs), which must approve research involving human subjects carried out by universities and other organizations, should reject proposed research that will promote racial theories of intelligence, because the harm of such research--which fosters racism even if not motivated by racism--far outweighs any alleged benefits." In other words, he thinks the principle of academic freedom should be curtailed when it comes to research regarding race and intelligence, as if it isn't already career suicide to perform such research, or even write about it (see Razib Khan being fired from the New York Times after Gawker outed him as having written that the correlation between race and intelligence was something that is (gasp) still open to debate).
Do you want a host of articles refuting his bigoted views (again, none of which are challenging his capacity as a scientist, but his claims about Africans)? Here goes!
Interestingly all of the claims put forth in the sources that you cited were refuted in the Jason Malloy piece that I already linked to.
https://mlyon01.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/in-response-to-james-watson-racist-nobel-prize-winner/ (devestating!)
It's spelled devastating, and the claim here is that "we do not yet know how to define human intelligence", and even if we did there isn't any evidence that it has a genetic component. Hacks like Steven Jay Gould are cited, and we are told that there is a longer piece, “Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class,” written from a communist perspective.
TL;DR Steven Jay Gould and Communists think that intelligence doesn't real. Not persuasive.
http://www.nih.gov/about/director/10192007statement.htm (shattering!)
That's a three sentence statement with no references to any data. Notably, Zerhouni does not have specific expertise in genetics.
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-troubling-tome/99999 (crushing!)
That's a book review by an anthropologist (perhaps the most consistently ideologically biased of the sciences, especially on this issue), and the only relation to Watson's comments are that he supposedly read it and thought favorably of it. I can find several positive reviews of the book by prominent scientists such as E.O. Wilson as well. Personally I'd rather put my trust in the scientific opinions of people like James Watson and E.O. Wilson than in some two-bit anthropologist with an ideological axe-to-grind. You're not actually an anthropologist, are you?