It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

When we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up. Having been brought up among the biologists and having followed various debates about ways to improve the human template and other debates about the true nature of our nature, I began seriously to wonder: What if? We hold in our hands a tool that is more powerful - for good or ill - than any we have wielded before.

To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole.

Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both.

Victorian literature was my subject at Harvard.

Laughter may instruct but it may also conceal, defending the joker against anger and retaliation: a game is only a game.