I like travelling on my own. It means I'm completely free to think about what's around me.

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

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.

People think I appear on television to promote my image. That's not fair. I hate filming. I turned down 'Strictly Come Dancing.' But television is a wonderful opportunity to promote scientific ideas. 'Super Doctors' is a very thoughtful piece.

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

That Britain today is a liberal society is largely because of the philosophy and outlook of the Anglican Church, which did so much to shape our core values in the past few centuries.

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?'