I was condemned unfairly over 'girls' remark, Nobel winner Tim Hunt says

Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt during the interview by The Standard on Saturday writer Joy Wanja Muraya in Seoul Korea, last week. [PHOTO: courtesy/ STANDARD]

Words have incredible power; they can make hearts soar or sore.

Last week, a speech of about 40 words stung hearts when Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt spoke at a lunch hosted by the 9th World Conference of Science Journalists at COEX in Seoul, South Korea.

It went viral and cost Dr Hunt his job as honorary professor at University College London’s Faculty of Life Sciences and as a board member at the European Research Council.

“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,” he told delegates.

And in an interview with The Guardian a few days later, Tim said he had been “hung out to dry” by academic institutions for his remarks. “I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs,” he said. “I have become toxic.”
His wife, Prof Mary Collins, a leading immunologist said she was called by a university official shortly after the news broke about Hunt’s comments and termed the institutions demand for a designation as a betrayal.

Hunt together with Leland H Hartwell and Sir Paul M Nurse, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001 for discovering “Key regulators of the cell cycle”.
Their global award was for discovery of protein molecules that control the division of cells.

Before the controversial comments, Hunt had an interview with The Standard on Saturday at the COEX convention and exhibition Centre that hosted the biennial meeting for science journalists.

Attracts more attention

The interview takes off with Hunt pointing out that he retired in 2010 and now mostly spends his time giving talks on science on invitations globally.

In 2006, he was awarded the Royal Medal for his work on cell cycle control and was knighted by the Queen in the same year but refuses to be referred to as Sir Tim Hunt adding it was a great homour to receive it, its use attracts more attention than ‘simply’ being Tim Hunt.

Born in Neston in 1943 near Liverpool his father, Richard Hunt, studied ancient and historical handwriting and his mother was Kit Rowland, daughter of a timber trader.

On a rainy Monday morning, he received a call at 10am announcing he had jointly won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

He was working in the laboratory and was asked to keep the good news to himself for another 30 minutes until they contacted the other two awardees; Hartwell and Nurse.
Since his fax machine had broken down it was nearly unbelievable but later when he received the gold lettered document announcing the prize, it became a reality.

An Internet search at 10.31am confirmed the message, but he says it seemed like a cruel trick on him that early in the morning.

And as he made his way to the announcement later that day, the clicking cameras gave away that the Nobel Prize had been jointly given to him and two other colleagues.
“I called my wife to share the good news but her phone was off. But breaking the same to his seven-year-old daughter had an interesting twist too.”

“So young, she told the entire school that ‘My dad won the Nobel Prize” and her excitement meant was a proud moment for me,” Hunt says adding that the flip side was that their other daughter was only three years old and had no idea the euphoria at their home that evening and the next couple of days.

However, Hunt admits that his formative years did not take off on a scientific note as he began taking Latin lessons at home before he was enrolled at the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls; a contrast to the next six decades which he spent anchored on understanding how a parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells.

He only lasted a year at the girl’s school before he joined the Dragon school, a co-educational school started by a group of Oxford University lecturers for their children.

The arts, he says, were also a favorite because they made him confident but his most cherished moments were the weekly science classes by Gerd Sommerhoff.

First love

His impressions in science were seen through this young German teacher who opened up his world to the creed that science is easy.
And from then on, it was a perch from one tree of science to another before eternally falling in love with biology.

“I also liked English, was bad at maths and hopeless at history, and fanatical about cricket, though not terribly good,” he described his relationship with other subjects in his Nobel Prize biography in 2001.

His next affair with science was at the Magdalen College School, Oxford, where his interest in how the human body works was deepened and the freedom to experiment in the laboratories was encouraged.

“It’s a good feeling to follow a trail in science and understand why life (biology) is the way it is,” Hunt says.

He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1968, and proceeded as a postdoctoral fellow to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

In 1971, he returned to Cambridge where he taught biochemistry and cell biology and in 1990 he moved to the Cancer Research UK.

Some of the top institutions and scientists he has worked with in the last four decades include Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge, Tony Hunter, Nechama Kosower from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and John Gerhart among others.

A discussion over dinner with the latter led to a light bulb moment as they shared about a protein enzyme known as Maturation Promoting Factor which catalyses cell division.

Hunt passionately discusses a disappearing protein, which he named cyclin, that faded away during the production of other proteins and this advanced his work further. According to Hunt, cell division is controlled by synthesis which switched the disappearing protein on and its breakdown subsequently made it unrecognizable.

“We had discovered the engine of the cell cycle, “he says adding that the Eureka moment was capped by writing a letter home explaining the Eureka! Moment.

Though he describes it as an accidental discovery, he appreciates that the findings are fundamental in modern science to explain how the cell works, how division occurs and when they know that it is time to bring the division to an absolute halt.

He acknowledges that retirement is a lower profile than decades spent closely examining petri dishes keen to understand physiology and provide new information.