A very flawed accuser: Investigation into the academic who hounded a Nobel Prize winning scientist out of his job reveals troubling questions about her testimony

On Monday, June 8, a British academic called Connie St Louis uploaded a sensational document to her Twitter feed. Beginning with the question ‘Why are the British so embarrassing abroad?’, it offered an account of bizarre remarks that a Nobel Prize-winning biologist by the name of Sir Tim Hunt had made earlier that day at a conference in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

His audience was comprised of roughly 100 science journalists, most of them female, who were being treated to a free lunch by a local trade body representing Women’s Science & Technology Associations.

According to St Louis, who was in the crowd, their meal was ‘utterly ruined’ by the ‘sexist speaker’. She claimed that Sir Tim, having been asked to deliver a toast, embarked on a surreal rant in which he boasted of being a ‘male chauvinist’.

‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls,’ it purportedly went. ‘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.’

According to St Louis, Sir Tim then took the odd step of claiming that ‘single-sex’ science laboratories were preferable to ones in which men and women work together.

‘Really, does this Nobel laureate think we are still in Victorian times?’ she asked.

So began an extraordinary course of events that saw her tweet shared more than 600 times, kick-starting a viral scandal which resulted in the 72-year-old academic, famed for his pioneering work on cell division, being vilified across social media.

Sir Tim, screamed critics, was the epitome of an unreconstructed misogynist; an ‘out-of-touch a***hole’ to quote one of many hostile tweets, who should have no place in modern academia and whose comments laid bare the institutional sexism that allegedly pervades the world of science.

Within hours, Sir Tim was being hauled across the coals in newspapers and TV bulletins across the world. Unable to defend himself, since he was travelling back to the UK, the bespectacled professor’s only response was delivered via a voicemail message to Radio 4’s Today programme recorded in haste via mobile telephone in Seoul airport..DailyMail