Women in the laboratory

Tim Hunt, unnecessarily I thought, fell on his sword for saying some silly and facetious things about working with women. It brought back memories of my student days spent in laboratories of one sort and another. Thankfully I never had to earn my living by working in one but a significant part of getting a degree in biochemistry requires reaching a certain standard of lab work.

Also a homage is overdue to a particular lady with whom I spent many fraught, and some pleasant, hours struggling with experiments.

All of the first year students at Sheffield University who were studying any biological science in 1969 did the same Integrated Biology course, with lectures in a large lecture theatre. In a room full of beautiful girls, Ruth Hodgson was a goddess. She wasn't tall and didn't wear short skirts, but there always seemed to be a shaft of sunlight catching her long blond hair even in a darkened room. I was smitten from the start, and worshipped from afar for months.

How Ruth ended up as my partner for laboratory practicals I still can't work out. Perhaps we were equally bad at biochemistry lab work. Perhaps I was the only guy who wasn't trying to get in her knickers (mainly because I didn't have the faintest idea how to go about it; back then I was basically Raj from the Big Bang Theory).

In the time we worked together in the lab I learnt next to nothing about her except that she suffered badly from asthma and was from Huddersfield.

The only clear memory I really do have of the lab was being called "a bloody little communist" by a particularly unpleasant fellow student when I used a centrifuge out of turn. (It wasn't even in use at the time.) I failed to reply "at least I'm not a pillock" but the repartee is never there when you want it. I presume his animosity was related to the time I was the only biochemistry student to observe a day of action after the US bombing of Cambodia. (Yes, back then it was novel for a country to drop munitions on another country with which it was not at war.) Or maybe he was jealous of me working with the lovely Ruth... Wish I could remember the creep's name.

I did go round to Ruth's student house once to take some work when she was off sick. I remember her in her dressing gown looking very poorly. She got a 2(2) and, I believe, got married and became Ruth Ellis. And within 4 months of leaving Sheffield so did I (to someone much nicer, another blond but from Barnsley).

But I still treasure the memory of standing at some lab bench pipetting god-knows-what into a pumped-up bovine adrenal gland or something equally disgusting, with Ruth behind me observing, her left breast pressing comfortably into my right elbow. Almost made up for the hell that was the biochemistry lab.