Tim Hunt

“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.”

“In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.”

“I certainly don't recognise myself as the horrible sexist portrayed in media reports, and I don't think the women who have worked with me throughout my career do either.”

“I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“If UCL did offer to reinstate me, it would be churlish of me to refuse, but really, my work there was over.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“'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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I think people love fundamental science.”

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

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