London: A chauvinist remark on girls landed a Noble Prize winner biochemist in soup and he had to resign from the post of honorary professor at University College London (UCL) in Britain.
Tim Hunt, a 72-year-old Nobel Laureate who won the prestigious prize in 2001 for physiology or medicine, and was knighted in 2006, came under heavy criticism after he admitted being a “chauvinist” and in favour of single-sex labs because working with girls was fraught with troubles.
“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, ” Tim Hunt told an audience full of journalists at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea.
His remarks at the conference were tweeted by Connie St Louis, who is a journalist as well as the Director of the MA in Science Journalism at City University, London. She lambasted him for his "Victorian era" comments and said how his sexist remarks ruined the conference sponsored by role model female Korean scientists and engineers.
Nobel scientist Tim Hunt FRS @royalsociety says at Korean women lunch “I’m a chauvinist and keep ‘girls’ single lab pic.twitter.com/Z9NhykaTPv
— Connie St Louis (@connie_stlouis) June 8, 2015
Later talking to the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Tim Hunt apologised for his remarks but said that he did mean what he said.
"(I am) really sorry that I said what I said.. it was a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists," Hunt told the BBC.
Defending his remarks, he said that his comment was made on a lighter note and he meant it in an ironic way.
However, he admitted having fallen in love with girls at the lab and said how it was “very disruptive to the science because it's terribly important that in a lab people are on a level playing field”.
"It is true that people - I have fallen in love with people in the lab and people in the lab have fallen in love with me..I found that these emotional entanglements made life very difficult,” he said.
His remarks that apparently did not go down well with the ladies at the conference, caused him to resign from the UCL.
In a statement posted on its website, the University College London (UCL) confirmed that Sir Tim Hunt FRS resigned from his position as Honorary Professor with the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences, following comments he made about women in science at the World Conference of Science Journalists on 9 June.
UCL added that it was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible with our commitment to gender equality.
Meanwhile, the Royal Society has distanced itself from Tim Hunt's comments in a post on its website titled “Science needs women”.
“Too many talented individuals do not fulfil their scientific potential because of issues such as gender and the Society is committed to helping to put this right. Sir Tim Hunt was speaking as an individual and his reported comments in no way reflect the views of the Royal Society”.
However, Connie St Louis has slammed it as a feeble response.
A feeble response from @royalsociety @edyong209 @carlzimmer @ivanoransky @deborahblum #WCSJ2015 pic.twitter.com/J0MSOvQK7z
— Connie St Louis (@connie_stlouis) June 9, 2015
