PC Violation

Another Nobel Prize winner has been crucified for daring to utter comments that are presumed to insult a protected group. Paul Hunt is the target in this NYT article.

A Nobel laureate has resigned as honorary professor at University College London after saying that female scientists should be segregated from male colleagues because women cry when criticized and are a romantic distraction in the laboratory.

The comments by Tim Hunt, 72, a biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for groundbreaking work on cell division, added fuel to a global cultural debate about discrimination against women in science.

He was pressured into resigning his position. It's bizarre to me that faculties members can survive torturing their students, exploiting them financially and sexually, but still get run out of town for making statements that are (a) widely believed and (2) arguably true.

The NYT quote is this:

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,” Mr. Hunt said Monday at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea. “Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.”

Supposedly he also said that he was in favor of single-sex labs. Well, I think that's a dumb idea, but if every one with a dumb idea was ridden out of town on a rail, towns would be poor in people and rails. We mostly all work in sexually integrated workplaces today, and while it is true that love, sex, and tears happen, we have learned to live with it. Now if we could only learn to live with criticism.

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