Tim Hunt Quotes

'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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- 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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

At the age of 14, I moved across town to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where science played a much larger role in the curriculum.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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.

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

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

- Tim Hunt

I think people love fundamental science.

- Tim Hunt