Think about the whole world of biological complex sciences. We still don't understand the way a protein folds the way it does.

Although the Nasser revolution of 1952 was secular, the culture remained deeply religious - but it was a faith of moderation and tolerance. Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.

If you like, there is a Guinness time. The reason for that it's fundamental. It is not that we have to keep shortening the time. It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them, the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations and this speeds is about a kilometre per second.

When I give a lecture on Egypt there are thousands of people in the lecture hall, so obviously they would like to go to science and they would love to do science, but you really have to get the correct science base in order for them to interact.

We still don't understand how the big bang and evolving all the way to the human species and so on. So all of this is going to be a very, very exciting to the new people.

I do feel quite strongly about this that probably one of the things that unfortunately this age now to get a Nobel Prize is to really use part of it to help the young people get excited about science.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that's really not the way it worked.