Tim Hunt Quotes

It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them, and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth.

My education started with Latin taught at home by a governess, I can't imagine why, and for some reason I attended the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls before moving to the Dragon School at the dangerous age of 8 or so.

Winning a Nobel Prize isn't about being clever at all. It's about making ... at least in physiology or medicine, it's about making discoveries, and you don't have to be clever to make a discovery, I don't think; it just comes up and punches you on the nose.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

My inbox is now bulging with touching emails from young women scientists who have been kind enough to write and thank me for inspiring them and helping them on their way. It has also been of great comfort to me to see many women at the top of science testifying for my record in supporting women scientists.

You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them.

Science is about nothing but getting at the truth, and anything that gets in the way of that diminishes, in my experience, the science.

I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it.

Most great advances have been a collaboration. That is the joy of science for me.

I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

Anyone can win the Nobel Prize if the scientist works hard on his research subject.

It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. 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. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, seriously, I'm impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.

Science is about applying what we know and asking what we don't know.

The best meeting I ever went to was a meeting in France where the talk slots were 60 minutes long, but you were told to prepare a five-minute talk. It was absolutely great because the entire talk was a conversation between the speaker and the audience.

I fought for seven years to have creche facilities at the Okinawa Institute of Science of Technology - and was ultimately successful. Less successful have been efforts to get a creche at the new Crick Institute in London, but this is something I will continue to push for.

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

I did not know that I can win the Nobel Prize.

I am extremely sorry for the remarks made during the recent Women in Science lunch at the world conference of science journalists in Seoul, Korea.

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 because it's terribly important that, in a lab, people are on a level playing field.

Education and research is national, not E.U., business.

In my own career, I have always tried to treat my colleagues with respect and kindness, whoever they are, and am proud to have developed and mentored the careers of many excellent young scientists who will be tackling tomorrow's biological problems long after I have left the scene.

In the fall of 1961, I went up to Clare College Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, with the intention of becoming a biochemist in the end.

I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.