When Tim Hunt, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, said last week that women in his lab tend to fall in love with him, and vice versa, I didn’t doubt that he was right. As a physics major at Yale in the 1970s, I developed crushes on nearly all my male professors.

I didn’t go on in physics, but I married, and divorced, a biologist. Many of my friends are scientists. I spent six years conducting interviews for my book The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club. And yes, scientists do fall in love with each other, just as lawyers, business people, and factory workers fall in love with each other, although female scientists may be even more prone to falling in love with their fellow scientists because laymen find them so intimidating. Distractions can ensue. Divorces. Sometimes lawsuits.

The solution is not, as Dr. Hunt (who has since resigned his honorary professorship at the University College London) suggests, to force female scientists to carry out their research in segregated labs. Such a suggestion, even in jest, could arise only from a point of view in which women are a distraction because men were here first. In the world in which Dr. Hunt grew up, women were a source of recreation during the rare hours when a man needed to get out of the lab and clear his head, or the source of the meals that appeared on his table when he rushed home to gobble down a steak before kissing the kids goodnight and rushing back to the lab. In that world, in which I also grew up, girls were conditioned to fall in love with any smart, successful man, no matter how flawed or homely (see Jane Eyre, Beauty and the Beast, or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”).

Thankfully, society is beginning to understand that the people who invent a game or build the playing field aren’t necessarily the most talented players of that game, or the fairest arbiters of who should get to play. As women have entered the workforce, corporations and universities have developed rules to deter employees from harassing or carrying on affairs with those they supervise.

For the most part, scientists who fall in love behave decently. But when distractions do ensue, the parties involved need to be able to sort out the complications. And scientists tend to be even worse than other people at discussing sex and love. You might be Captain Kirk at home, but you are expected to be Mr. Spock in the lab.