Sexist scientists are the real lab rats

14 June 2015 - 02:00 By Anjana Ahuja

Comments about women from a Nobel laureate prove academics need to get out more. Holes don't dig themselves. This universal law of engineering must be preoccupying the otherwise brilliant mind of distinguished British scientist Sir Tim Hunt as he considers the address he gave to a conference of science journalists in South Korea this week.His particular excavation started when he stood up, confessed to the room that he was a chauvinist pig and thanked the women present for making lunch.story_article_left1The 72-year-old biochemist then continued with his burrowing: "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry." By now neck-deep and warming to a strangely silent crowd, he voiced the cracking idea of single-sex labs.And then the soil started raining down on his head - largely thanks to Connie St Louis, the director of the science journalism programme at London's City University, who complained on Twitter of a lunch "utterly ruined by sexist speaker Tim Hunt ... Really does this Nobel Laureate still think we are in Victorian times?"The ensuing storm is a reminder that scientists really do need to get out more. Labs, though, can be remarkably unbothered about how they appear to outsiders. During my time as a researcher in a university department, I occasionally encountered people who would have struggled for acceptance in other walks of life.It didn't matter terribly: a certain meritorious kinship develops when a crowd comes together in common pursuit of an intellectual goal. Eccentricities are brushed aside, weirdness is welcomed. Even language barriers are ignored - who needs pleasantries when your graphs look beautiful?block_quotes_start I remember an older scientist making unwanted overtures — and him becoming irrationally angry at being rebuffed block_quotes_endAcademics tend to hang out with other academics, who all operate in the same sort of environment; scientists often marry other scientists (Hunt is married to the eminent immunologist Professor Mary Collins).Few scholars have the time to circulate beyond that; research is demanding and difficult, sometimes requiring dedication to the point of obsession. There isn't much time for the outside world to intrude correctively.So, when scientists do step outside their bubble or venture into the realms of emotions, it can be a car crash. I remember an older scientist of my brief acquaintance making unwanted overtures - and him becoming irrationally angry at being rebuffed.story_article_right2I could almost hear the warped logic - me man, you woman, you refuse, does not compute. With his idiosyncrasies hitherto tolerated, he could not grasp that he had crossed a line.But lest we think this is a generational issue, let us also recall the curious incident of the dude on prime-time: Dr Matt Taylor, the fortysomething comet scientist who wore a shirt bearing pictures of scantily clad women during the live transmission of the Rosetta probe touchdown.The peculiar-is-OK culture in science meant that (a) he chose that shirt of his own free will and (b) nobody around him said: "You are going to be watched by millions. Why the naked-lady shirt?"In fact, it wasn't Taylor's sartorial misstep that riled me - he tearfully apologised, thus disproving Hunt's assertion that only women cry - so much as the people who laughed it off because he had landed a spacecraft on a comet. His genius, they explained, excused the mildly sexist garb.Rubbish. First, it took hundreds of people, not a single bearded guy in shorts, to land the Rosetta spacecraft in the right place. Second, possessing a PhD - or even a Nobel prize - doesn't entitle you to behave like a jerk. - ©The Daily Telegraph, London..

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