A very flawed accuser
She’s the academic who hounded a Nobel Prize winning scientist out of his job for ‘sexism’. But this investigation reveals a history of lies and 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.
In it, he admitted making the fateful remark attributed to him by St Louis, and issued a forthright apologies for the ‘very stupid’ comment, saying he was ‘really, really sorry’ to have ‘caused offence’.
That wasn’t enough to stem the criticism, however. Instead, by the time he touched down at Heathrow, his career and reputation, built up over 50 years, lay in tatters.
The days that followed saw him unceremoniously hounded out of honorary positions at University College London (UCL), the Royal Society and the European Research Council (ERC).
Under siege at his Hertfordshire home, he sank into despair.
‘Tim sat on the sofa and started crying. Then I started crying,’ his wife, Professor Mary Collins (herself a prominent scientist) later recalled. ‘We just held on to each other.’
It was, in the eyes of many observers, a classic modern scandal: short, hysterical and fuelled by unswerving political correctness.
Yet, within days, a vigorous backlash had begun.
Troubled by Sir Tim’s fate, a collection of eminent scientists, including eight other Nobel Prize winners (and several senior female academics) chose to speak out publicly in support of him.
Many professed outrage that, in the echo-chamber of social media, a single careless remark, just 37 words long, could apparently derail the career of a pioneering scientist. Several added that they believed his fateful toast had been delivered off-the- cuff and taken out of context. Though the comments about women scientists were certainly misjudged, Sir Tim’s supporters claimed they were intended as an ironic joke (albeit one which misfired). He’d intended to satirise, rather than endorse, sexism, they argued.
Among the most vociferous was Sir Andre Geim, the University of Manchester professor who developed graphene (the world’s thinnest material, said to be able to revolutionise almost every part of everyday life).
He claimed that Sir Tim was being ‘crucified’ by ideological fanatics.
Professor Dame Valerie Beral, director of Oxford University’s Cancer Epidemiology Unit, described him as a ‘very kind and very eccentric unworldly sort of man’ whose words had been misinterpreted.
‘I just think those comments were self-deprecatory. He will have said it as a complete joke,’ she said.
All of them called for UCL, the Royal Society and the ERC to re-instate him. The institutions, however, refused to play ball.
Then, early this week, the simmering dispute took a further, seismic twist.
It came courtesy of The Times newspaper, which revealed the contents of a leaked report into Sir Tim’s fall from grace compiled by an EU official who had accompanied him to the Seoul conference.
This individual, who has not been named, sat with him at the lunch and provided a transcript of what Sir Tim ‘really said’.
Crucially, it presented a very different take to the one which had been so energetically circulated by Connie St Louis.
The report began by confirming that Sir Tim had joked about falling in love with women in laboratories and ‘making them cry’.
However, it said he’d prefaced those comments with an ironic introduction, joking that they would illustrate what a ‘ chauvinist monster’ he was.
The report then revealed the existence of an entire second half of the controversial toast.
In it, Sir Tim was said to have told his audience that his remark about ‘making them cry’ was, indeed, an ironic joke.
He purportedly said, ‘ now seriously . . .’ before going on to speak enthusiastically about the ‘ important role’ women scientists play. He ended by joking that his largely female audience should pursue their trade, ‘despite monsters like me’.
The report’s author added: ‘I didn’t notice any uncomfortable silence or any awkwardness in the room as reported on social and then mainstream media,’ going on to describe the speech as ‘warm and funny’.
All of which, for quite understandable reasons, sparked further angry debate. Supporters of Sir Tim felt he had been vindicated. Among
Another witness to Hunt’s speech slams her version Should we trust her word over a Nobel laureate’s?
them was Professor Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who said the leaked memo’s contents showed Sir Tim to be ‘the reverse of a chauvinist monster’.
He added that the ‘lynch mob’ who had contributed to Sir Tim’s downfall should consider their own positions and that his colleague ‘should be swiftly restored to the honoured place he deserves’.
However, Sir Tim’s critics remained unmoved and disputed the EU report’s contents. Importantly, given how the scandal had originally emerged, they were led by Connie St Louis.
She stood by her remarks and told the Mail that she explicitly denied that the scientist’s toast ever contained the words ‘now seriously’.
As a result, this explosive controversy now rests on a single, straightforward question: which of these two, first-hand versions of events is true? Either the anonymous EU official is telling the truth, in which case Sir Tim is a hapless victim, guilty of nothing more than telling a misjudged joke. Or Connie St Louis, the architect of the witch-hunt against him, is in the right. In that case, many will continue to argue that he got what he deserved. So, who are we to believe? The EU report appears to dovetail with Sir Tim’s own version of events. Meanwhile, Connie St Louis’s account is shared by two fellow witnesses: Deborah Blum, an academic from Wisconsin, and Ivan Oransky, co-founder of a science website called Retraction Watch. Although, following the leaked report, Blum and Oransky told The Times that they could not recall enough to confirm or deny the additional quotes from Sir Tim.
Strangely, given that there were more than 90 other journalists present at the fateful lunch in Seoul, no other detailed accounts of the toast have emerged.
St Louis did not make a shorthand transcript of it. And, again very strangely, no tape- recording appears to exist.
Perhaps, therefore, we should ask two other related questions: who exactly is Connie St Louis? And why, exactly, should we trust her word over that of a Nobel laureate?
A good place to start is the website of London’s City University, where St Louis has, for more than a decade, been employed to run a postgraduate course in science journalism.
Here, on a page outlining her CV, she is described as follows:
‘Connie St Louis . . . is an awardwinning freelance broadcaster, journalist, writer and scientist.
‘She presents and produces a range of programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service . . . She writes for numerous outlets, including The Independent, Daily Mail, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, BBC On Air magazine and BBC Online.’
All very prestigious. Comforting, no doubt, for potential students considering whether to devote a year of their lives (and money) to completing an MA course under her stewardship. Except, that is for one small detail: almost all of these supposed ‘facts’ appear to be untrue.
For one thing, Connie St Louis does not ‘ present and produce’ a range of programmes for Radio 4.
Her most recent work for the station, a documentary about pharmaceuticals called The Magic Bullet, was broadcast in October 2007.
For another, it’s demonstrably false to say she ‘writes’ for The Independent, Daily Mail and The Sunday Times.
Digital archives for all three newspapers, which stretch back at least 20 years, contain no by-lined articles that she has written for any of these titles, either in their print or online editions. The Mail’s accounts department has no record of ever paying her for a contribution.
Her work for The Guardian appears to consist of two online articles: one published in 2013; the other, about the Sir Tim Hunt affair, went live (online) this week.
Curiously, that 1,000-word piece, in which St Louis recalled the scandal, was heavily edited after publication. Around 30 changes, some of
them significant, were made to it. In an apparent contradiction of usual Guardian policy, the version now running online contains no disclaimer detailing this fact.
Elsewhere on the City University web page, readers are led to believe that St Louis has either become, or is soon to become, a published author.
‘She is a recipient of the prestigious Joseph Rowntree Journalist Fellowship to write a book based on her acclaimed two-part Radio 4 documentary series, Raising Ham,’ it reads.
But that is not the full story. In 2005, St Louis did, indeed, receive the liberal organisation’s ‘fellowship’. She was given £50,000, which was supposed to support her while she wrote the book in question.
However, no book was ever published. Or, indeed, written. An entire decade later, the project remains a work in progress.
Asked to explain these discrepancies — although details of the claims are carried, remember, on the internet page where she is supposed to present her credentials to students and fellow academics — St Louis said she had done interviews for the Daily Mail but conceded it was ‘possible’ that she had never written for the paper.
She said her by-lined articles in the Independent and Sunday Times may have been published more than two decades ago. Asked how she could, therefore, justify the claim on her CV that she ‘writes’ for the titles, she hung up.
In a subsequent email, St Louis appeared to backtrack and insist that she has written for all the newspapers cited on her CV, but said: ‘I don’t have time . . . to find all the articles on different old computers.’
She did not respond to a question asking what awards she had ever won for journalism, science, broadcasting or writing.
With regard to the £50,000 fellowship, she added: ‘I didn’t finish the Rowntree book I was writing because I had breast cancer and was extremely ill for a year.
‘Then, after that, I had to work to look after my family. It doesn [sic] take away the fact that I won it [the £50,000] and still hope to finish the book does it?’
Readers can, of course, draw their own conclusions.
In common with most academics, St Louis also uses her online CV to cite articles she has previously published in prestigious academic journals. It claims that she has published three. However, even this is misleading. Two of the three cited journal articles are the same: a piece for the British Medical Journal entitled: ‘Can Twitter predict disease outbreaks?’
Are such errors merely sloppy? Or were they designed to mislead? And what do they tell us about the attention to detail of a woman whose purported recollection of a short lunchtime toast has effectively ruined a Nobel laureate’s career?
Again, readers must draw their own conclusions.
In an email, one of the prominent scientists who have publicly supported Sir Tim Hunt tells me: ‘What you have discovered is very alarming. False claims about publications are taken very seriously by universities. Perhaps even more seriously than reports of dodgy, sexist speeches!’
Another, Dame Valerie Beral, who has worked with Sir Tim, added that if St Louis had made false claims on her CV, then her evidence about his speech ought to be discounted.
‘I think the institutions who have forced Tim to resign now need to look at the claims that this person has made in the past, and work out whether they can trust what she says regarding this incident.
‘If her previous claims turn out to be false, then I believe that Tim must be re-instated.’
City University, meanwhile, says it’s investigating the web page in question.
This is not, however, the only medium in which St Louis appears to make false, or at least misleading, statements.
Earlier this year, she stood, successfully ,in an election to become a board member of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ). As part of the election process, St Louis was required to present a detailed CV to voters.
This document, which stretches to six pages, is still on the WFSJ’s website. It contains several deeply questionable statements.
In an early passage, she for example writes: ‘I am a regular contributor to ABC News Worldview TV programme.’ Yet ABC News Worldview has not aired for roughly five years. Factiva, an online search engine which carried transcripts of it, suggests that the last recorded contribution by Connie St Louis to the show was on May 31, 2006.
In another early passage, St Louis writes that she has a second career working for quangos.
‘In November 2002, I was invited and subsequently appointed by the Minister responsible for media, sport and culture to be a board member of UK Sport (the former UK Sports Council) . . . My term of office ended last year but I continue to serve on the audit committee as an external member.’
UK Sport describes things differently. A spokesman says St Louis was appointed to the board in November 2002 but she left in 2005.
St Louis did not respond when asked by the Mail how she can, therefore, claim, in a CV published in 2015, to have been a board member of UK Sport until ‘last year’.
Elsewhere in the six-page CV is a section devoted to ‘Qualification and Training’. In it, St Louis trumpets the fact that she is ‘a member of the Royal Institution’.
Again, very prestigious. Or so it seems, until a spokesman for the Royal Institution told me: ‘Anyone can be a member. It’s simply a service you pay for which entitles you to free tickets to visit us and gives you a discount in our cafe.
‘It’s like having membership of your local cinema or gym.’
Why would someone include such a thing on their CV?
‘Actually, that’s a bit of a problem,’ the spokesman added. ‘We have heard of a few people using membership on their CV to imply that they have some sort of professional recognition or qualification. But it means nothing of the sort. It’s very, very odd to see this on a CV.’
St Louis did not respond when the Mail asked why she cited this membership as a ‘qualification’.
Neither, as it happens, did she reply to a request to explain what academic qualifications she actually has.
The CV again is unclear. In a section outlining her education, she states: ‘BSc (Hons) Upper Second Class degree in Applied Biology.’ But it does not state where she gained it from, making it impossible to fact-check.
Doubtless, more facts will eventually emerge, perhaps once City University has finished investigating this matter.
In the meantime, those who have condemned the Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt may wish to re-examine some of her previous statements about the affair.
Take, by way of a final example, an interview with the BBC on June 10, in which St Louis recalled that toast in Seoul: ‘He just ploughed on for five to seven minutes, actually,’ she said. ‘It was really shocking. It was culturally insensitive and it was very sexist.’
Strangely, the passage from Sir Tim’s speech that St Louis has so far made public is exactly 37 words long. It would take, at most, 20 seconds to recount.
So did Sir Tim really ‘plough on’ for five to seven minutes? And, if so, what did he say?
Why did she selectively quote just one statement from his toast? And how did such a remark end the 50year career of a Nobel laureate?
Once more, readers must draw their own conclusions.
Some ‘facts’ on St Louis’s CV appear to be untrue
One of her ‘qualifications’ is akin to a gym pass ‘What you have discovered is very alarming’