Relics like Tim Hunt, slagskeppet Bismarck och min dotter

A new generation of women is confident of its place in the laboratory so there’s no need to hound relics like Tim Hunt. How many of them wanted Sir Tim, a Nobel prize winner for his work on cell division, to quit his honorary professorship at University College London? 

Very few, I bet. 

His was a voice from another age; the awkwardly conveyed experiences of a 72-year-old man, educated in the 1950s at the then all-male Magdalen College School and Clare College, Cambridge

I meet Sir Tims all the time. The more courtly ones call you “my dear” and open doors; the more lecherous look women appraisingly up and down in a blatant way younger men wouldn’t dare. 

Moreover these young women holding pipettes, PowerPointing at conferences, writing computer code, clad in bio-hazard suits and protective goggles, were funny. “Check out my rack,” posted one beside a stand for test tubes. The very idea that, as Hunt argued, they were just cluttering up the place by falling in love and crying when criticised, was to them an uproarious joke.

Janice Turner, The Times, 13 June 2015


Sir Richard Timothy "Tim" Hunt,  was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H. Hartwell for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells, Wikipedia

Relics like Tim Hunt, 72?

Själv är jag 74. 

När jag föddes fanns det tyska slagskeppet Bismarck, med ett deplacement på 41,700 t - internt skämt -  fortfarande på oceanens yta och det tyska angreppet på Sovjetunionen hade fått skjutas upp  några månader närmare vintern på grund av grekernas tappra motstånd.

Ja, ja, pappa, brukar dottern sucka om en del av mina uttalanden. Hon är ofta klok som en artikel i The Times. 

Och hon har, till min oerhörda glädje och stolthet, studerat på Karolinska Institutet.

Se även SINK THE BISMARCK





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