Having a child is arguably the most important thing you do in life.

My own field, the prevention of genetic disorders in babies, has been possible only because of humane work on animals.

Carbon dioxide is unusual because it doesn't go through the usual three phases of matter, from solid to liquid to gas, but it goes straight from solid to gas. The volume of the gas is much greater than the volume of the solid. When a solid turns into a gas, we say it sublimes. The process is sublimation.

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

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.

Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.