Friday 12 June 2015

What do female scientists do- as per Tim Hunt

Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize winner, kicked up a storm when he declared that he preferred single-sex labs as women cry and distract men.  Apparently we women are capable of only two things- Romance and Tears.
There has been hilarious response to Tim Hunt's comments. They can be found here, and here. Probably there are more of them but that is all I could find in the morning while I am trying to finish the cooking, watering the plants and getting ready for the lab.  I do not have any photographs of myself working (oops! romancing and crying) in the lab but somehow  purifying the protein and RNA from calf thymus and rabbit tissues has never been conducive for taking photographs. And I am talking of those days when we had to use film rolls and then develop it later. I wish I had but when you are using phenol and chloroform to break down rabbit tissues to extract tRNA, the last thing you have in mind is photographs and romancing and tears.
It is not the first time a Nobel Prize winner has made an ass of himself.  There was James Watson some years back kicking up a storm and finally resigning as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.  His view of Rosalind Franklin, who took all the X-ray images of DNA that Watson analyzed, is well-known. Of course, he never acknowledged Franklin.  The Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.  Franklin was dead by then.
At home, we women know how hard it is to break the glass-ceiling. We are overlooked for most of the awards. A colleague once told me that he always wants to give the men a higher salary because they have to run the house.  I have still not recovered from that remark.
Ultimately, it is as  Ginger Rogers said:
"Sure, he (Fred Astaire) was great but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did every thing he did backwards....and in high heels."

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