It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.

Like our attitude to love, truth and goodness, we seem to be confident about knowing what beauty is - certain, even dogmatic - until we think hard about the idea, whereupon all confidence flies away.

You have to believe in a placebo or it wont work, but if it works, its obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.

I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil.

It's a mark of any icon that it should be open to iconoclasm.