Tim Hunt and the God Particle

Let me tell you about my problem with cell-splitting Nobel laureates. They win a prize, you adulate them, they piss you off, then the girls make them cry, then they quit their tenured positions. And then everything is women’s faults.

Oh why can’t the prissy drama queens stay in their gender segregated cages so we can study their characteristics, yes? This is how scientists with their hyper organised minds like to think.

Sugar - check, spice – check, all things nice – check. Now why is this one here THINKING? Good god Tim, look at these, she doesn’t want to be fair and sugary and smell like a frikkin’ vanilla bean pod. Now what? Is she male? Snips? Nope. Snails? Nope. Puppy Dogs Tails? Err....

[Siren goes off]

All male scientists assemble in the evacuation pod.

“Gentlemen” said Tim Huton, “we have a problem.”

“Ahh” said the wise eggheads whom no woman in her right mind would date, not least because of a lack of hair on their heads.

In a lab survey circulated at the University College,  London, asked to list reasons why they wouldn’t date/befriend male scientists, women scientists listed, in ascending order:

1) they never shave, get haircuts in time or iron their clothes

2) don’t use deodorant

3) ill mannered

4) fart after lunch in small air conditioned cabins

5) constantly trying to borrow a quid

6) steal credit from subordinates

7) don’t know how to work in teams

8) keep imagining co-workers fall in love with them. aka. Sexual harassment because

9) suffer from a God complex

The eggheads, inexplicably excited by the results, raced with this information to CERN where even more eggheads were busy isolating the God Particle.

“Does it have mass now?” one of them shrieked.

“We have the answer to the universe” Hunt’s team chanted, in unison.

“We’re listening” the boys at CERN said, bemused, preparing themselves to refute all theories posited.

“We, we, it is us men” proclaimed Tim Huton, “We are the God Particle ourselves” said Hunt, submitting, on a single microscope slide, a cell that had earlier split from himself in revulsion.

“Hmmm, we can’t possibly refute that” said the all male egghead convention now gathering around the Super Collider.

They watched as the sole isolated male cell thrashed about trying to acquire critical mass. Just like a man, to constantly walk about trying to give something his mass.

The void just kept thrusting the mass right back at it. You’d think they’d get the message.

The eggheads (and Tim Hunt) thought all night and all day for weeks. They locked themselves in glass cubicles putting themselves under cctv surveillance and hooked themselves up to electrodes to capture any expressions of genius that might escape in REM mode.

Finally, one of them, the kid who had pointed out the emperor had no clothes and grown up to be a know it all, finger-pointing scientist for having been told all his life what a genius he was, said it out loud.

“We need a female cell.”

No alarm sounded. No sirens went off. And no evacuation pods were activated.

Someone flung a week old muffin at Hunt’s head.

“Imbecile” someone else said. Someone else left to take a shower. A third was heard saying “Siri, call mummy”.

To split a cell, you first have to create one. And to create one, you need a female cell. All life, even asexual ones, begins with the mother cell and then the daughter cells.

You know.. birthing.. or the granting of mass.

You’d think a biochemist would know better.

But who asked women, right?

[Shrug] God’s in Her Heaven, all’s right with the world.