I'm a traditional Jew with an orthodox background, and it informs much of my approach to science. Of course I think it's very important that if you have those sorts of backgrounds you don't impose them on other people as a clinician, of course.

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

It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'

To build and strengthen new connections, the brain needs the challenge of fresh and unusual stimuli. .... There's a lot of evidence to suggest that repetition is bad for brain health, and novelty is good.

There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.

Women of child-bearing age steadily run out of eggs by the continuous process of cell death. While reading a copy of the Guardian carefully from cover to cover, a normal woman will have lost on average two eggs - while, typically, a normal man will have made 70,000 new sperm.

I went to school with butterflies of fear every day for years - from primary school onwards - not just worried about being bullied by classmates, but by teachers.