Scientists need to be prepared to engage, and the best people to engage with are students, ideally from primary school because there's no question that their capacity to work out complex things is extremely good.

A young woman in her teens has about 300,000 eggs in her ovaries. By the time she is menopausal, none are left.

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people.

I don't know whether it is important to study science at a young age, though current thinking emphasises the need.

We can't any longer have the conventional understanding of genetics which everybody peddles because it is increasingly obvious that epigenetics - actually things which influence the genome's function - are much more important than we realised.

Ethics is not routinely taught to science students except in medicine, and I think it should be.

Of course it is a very simple matter to identify genes which might modify intelligence or memory and start thinking about whether you want to enhance a human, and the next generation is going to have to deal with that issue. Should we be trying to enhance humans rather than trying to educate them and so on?