I found with my students they don't necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what's relevant to what's he doing you see.

I came from Egypt and I owe Egypt a lot to what I am now.

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.

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.

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.

There are many, many books I've read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something. But the universe at large is full of questions that we still don't know anything about and there will be always young people brilliant who are going to make new discoveries.