This was yet another colonial fascination: to create the conditions of misery in a population, then subject it to social or medical experimentation.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

In Paris, friend of Bequerel’s, a young physicist-chemist couple named Pierre and Marie Curie, began to scour the natural world for even more powerful chemical sources of X-rays. Pierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.

Postwar U.S. was the world's leader in science and technology. The investment in science research was staggering.

I think when we use 'stress', we are often using a kind of dummy word to try to fit many different things into one big category.

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

I left Delhi in 1989 and remember very little of how life used to be then. Increasingly, in my recent visits to Delhi, I've started to realize that the city has become intellectually very lively. It makes me want to discover the city over and over again.