One of my mentors, Tom Frank, a professor of law at NYU, he was really instrumental in making me understand that we need to look at the global picture, and we always need to not take anything for granted, but go very much through a process of critical thinking before we formulate our views. So he was, I think, instrumental in shaping my views as to how to pursue my career in the future.

It is usually 4 or 5 in the morning so I go downstairs and make tea and then read a bit of poetry – Mary Oliver, Rumi, Hafiz, Seamus Heaney, Yeats, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Rilke are among my favorites…

There’s a huge amount of chefs that I find inspiring and have been influential in my career from early days. People like Marco Pierre White and the Roux brothers are amazing, but even now there's some fantastic young chefs that are creative and exciting.

The music of the “I Have a Dream” speech is a replication of the music which comes out of the mouths of the African American preacher. Preacher, singer, blues singer, jazz singer, rap person, it is so catching, so hypnotic, so wonderful that, as a poet, I continue to try to catch it, to catch the music.

First of all, I believe that the results of science should be fully given to the community. Fully. Absolutely. And all types of competition such as who did it first and “I cannot tell him because he will copy me” and so on – these are not arguments. Society financed this science, if not directly, then the education and the way I got there, so society should get back what I found. It is not my finding. In this, I am not very popular, I must say.

Today, in my opinion, people are more interested in the number of papers and the way of judging people has become much more statistical. Pupils are already doing this right from the beginning. Also, very few people go into basic science, there’s a big thing about making money e.g. biotech. Some people view education as a tool for making money or at least for making a good life, rather than understanding and digging down into something, which was my motivation.

I like reading, I like swimming.I go snorkeling if I can. But not because I’m stuck, but because I enjoy them. And when I am swimming or whatever, I find I have more time to think.

people in power tend to take advantage of that power and this can be both men and women.

When I was a child and interested in discoveries, the first book that made an impression on me was called “Discoveries of the World” but it wasn’t about geography, it was about Marie Curie! [laughs] And then there is a beautiful Italian story – from the mountains in Italy to the Pyrenees, a kid goes to look for a flower with a golden heart inside for his ill mother. This made a big impression on me.  I also read lots of Isreali authors that you probably haven’t heard of.

Try to make better antibiotics. I’m not sure we can cure everything, that we can win the game against bacteria, but we can try to control it, to make the appearance of resistance more controllable. We can look for new antibiotics, not overuse antibiotics, not use antibiotics where they are not needed. If possible, if somebody has an idea for something completely new, I would love that.