The first biography I read — I think the first scientific biography — was Madame Curie . And my mother, who was a surgeon, worked at the Marie Curie Hospital. She’d met Marie Curie, who was one of her great heroines. And reading the book, I think, was the first portrait of a scientist and the romance of a scientific life.

The second, probably, and I didn’t talk about it in my book, which is always interesting to me, because it didn’t come up within a lesson, okay, within the book teaching me a lesson, but the second was Don Quixote. And that ties in so much to the optimistic part of me, this idea of tilting at windmills, whether they’re real or not. The imagination of them, what fueled that man, that love, that idyllic sort of quest. That can be life sometimes. We don’t always achieve what we end up hoping for. We can work very, very hard at things and come up short. But I take comfort from having dreamt the dream. From having taken the steps, the quest, to undergo the quest of trying to reach them. If at the end you don’t, you’ve had the journey, and I always think the journeys are valuable. They give you lessons, they give you memories. They help you meet people, they help you have an adventure in life. And so for me, that probably, when I’ve read that book, I understood that I was okay. Being optimistic wasn’t a bad thing. It was actually a very good thing.

As an adolescent, I read Raymond Williams, George Orwell and Simone de Beauvoir – a crash course in human decency.

It’s amazing. I just started looking at everything differently. I love that book. But a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information.

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 look for how to get out of it. I try to use here [points to her head]. I tried to read, I tried to talk to others. I tried my best to get out of it. I had lots of times climbing one Everest to find that there is a bigger Everest, but don’t you find your life like this too?

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.

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.

Ultimately, my research was curiosity driven, which kept me active even in low periods.

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.