Nobel winner branded ‘sexist’ for 5-year-old jokey MUSIC VIDEO where lab coats go flying

The man who won the Nobel Prize for cancer-treating laser research is taking heat on social media. Someone dredged up a jokey promotional video from 2013 in which he is seen dancing with women who strip off their lab coats.

The old video only surfaced and started racking up views – and angry reactions – after French scientist Gerard Mourou, along with American Arthur Ashkin and Canadian Donna Strickland, won the Physics Nobel Prize for their laser research earlier this week.

‘Have you seen ELI’ extolls the virtues of Extreme Light Infrastructure, a pan-European research collaboration. Set to a reggae song about science and lasers, it features amateur dancing in labs and auditoriums.

The lasers must have made those labs really hot, considering that at 2:55, the women surrounding Mourou and his male colleagues decide to tear off their lab coats all at once (something you should never do in a hazardous environment). All of them are dressed in everyday work clothes, except for two in the front row, who reveal the relatively modest shorts and blouses underneath.

But it does not seem to have aged well in the era of female empowerment and #MeToo. Angry commenters have branded the video “embarrassing,” “sexist,” and plain “terrible.”

Some found it bitterly ironic that it surfaced the year that a Physics Nobel Prize was won by a woman for the first time in 55 years – an event that was supposed to be a step forward towards equality for women in science.

Picking on a five-year-old light-hearted dance number to smear a man whose research involves fighting cancer, among other things, is just a low blow, some believe.

And since nobody was forced to do anything, no harm was done, others argued.

All in all, the effort that has gone into bashing Mourou could have been better placed elsewhere – like actually promoting female scientists.

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