Scientists behaving badly

Another Nobel prize winner is in trouble for straying into sexual politics.

This time it’s British cell biologist Sir Timothy Hunt who said &#8212 apparently as a joke &#8212 that he found working with female scientists in the lab distracting.
It might have been funny on an episode of “Mad Men,” but instead, he said it at an international luncheon for female science journalists, one of whom was Connie St. Louis of the University of London. She immediately tweeted the story.

“What he was saying was that women should be separated from men in the laboratory, he was saying that when feedback was given to women, they cry all the time,” St. Louis told the press.

Sir Timothy quickly went on the BBC to say he never intended to offend anyone, but that women are a distraction.

“It is true, I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it’s very disruptive to the science,” he said.

Timothy also maintained his stance that women tend to cry.

“If they burst in to tears, it means you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth,” he said.

Except they couldn’t have been too distracting because he has worked with several women, and even married one, and still managed to win the Nobel prize.

But of course he isn’t the first Nobel winner to speak a little too frankly. William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, worried that unintelligent people were reproducing too prolifically and ruining the gene pool.

James Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA, argued that Africa was genetically inferior and got into so much trouble, he couldn’t earn a living and had to auction off his Nobel medal.

Anyway, with the push to open up the sciences to more women, calling women a distraction is never funny. Except on CBS’s “Big Bang Theory,” where it’s pretty much the entire sitcom’s plot line.