A very important influence. Now when I look back on it, it was my father who was against the gender constraints of my time. And my mother, she used to be a working woman herself, she joined the National Guards. She was a captain in the National Guards. She was the first woman in Karachi to own a car and to drive, and people used to talk about her because they said, you know, “We’re not supposed to drive cars.” But when I look back on it, it was my mother who taught that a woman grew up to be married and to have children, and she would tell my father in front of me, “Why do you want to educate her? No man will want to marry her.” So all the time, for her, success depended on having a good catch as a husband, and having children. Whereas for my father, he broke free of those constraints, and he insisted that I have an education. He said, “Boys and girls are equal. I want my daughter to have the same opportunities.”

My great aunt was probably the greatest influence in my life. She was crippled. She never walked in her life. She crawled over the floor all her life. When my mother had to go out into the fields when we were smaller children, and then later go to California, she left us with my aunt, and my aunt could do everything except walk. She cooked the food for us, would bring everything to the stove. We had an old wood-burning stove. She cooked the food for us. She washed our clothes on this old washboard. We had to bring all the stuff there, the water, the soap, the washboard itself. She also disciplined us. So we had to break our own switch to get our punishment if we did something wrong. So we’d go out and break our own switch and come back and take our punishment.

My father was a lawyer. My mother was a homemaker. My father was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. He was involved very much during the Nasser era — which was one of the most repressive eras in Egyptian history — in fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and I think that to a lot of extent shaped my view as to what I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to have a world where people are free to express their views, to have freedom of worship, to have freedom from want, and I saw poverty in Egypt when I grew up. To me, freedom, in the larger sense — to be able to speak, to worship, free from want, free from fear — I think it was a key as to what I thought I would like to do when I grow up.

My parents were both physicians. The family physician type, not fancy researchers or anything like that. I picked up a sense of this idea that you do serve, you serve people actually. It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think they ever said that in any explicit term, but you could just see in terms of how — individual patients weren’t discussed — but just certain things were discussed, and you could see that that was important that you were doing something bigger than yourself. You were doing something for society. For some reason I was able to pick up on that, so I think that influenced. Especially my mother, who was a physician, who spent a lot of her hours in the office talking to her patients, and she would say talking was so important for many of her patients. Sometimes there weren’t even obvious things that a physician could do something about, but she said it meant a lot to them.

I felt at the time that Eric was much more successful than I, he was extremely productive during his time in Zurich, and worked on many very original projects, germ line, cell lineage, sex determination, where not many people could follow him. I also had the impression that I was dependent on him because he had more fly experience and without him I would not have gotten the job. This made our start in Heidelberg a little difficult, until we sorted things out, and from then on we thoroughly enjoyed working in the same lab.

As I was lazy and rarely did my homework, I finished high school with a rather mediocre exam. I almost did not pass in English language. Recently, my previous teachers allowed me to see their report on my high school performances, which included the following statements: Despite the fact that her talents are rather equally spread among many areas of knowledge, her performances are rather different depending on the distribution of her interests. Thus, with her strong display of self will she can be decidedly lazy in some topics over years, while in her areas of interests she performs to a degree far extending that required for normal school purposes.

so I sometimes think, why should I talk young women into being a scientist if they then end up being sort of disliked or not accepted by their contemporaries and so it’s a tricky business actually.

I don’t think it’s misused yet, people are afraid of it might be misused but on the other hand, there is also value in finding out about the relation between several particular predispositions. You might be more careful if you are told that your genetic background is such that you shouldn’t eat fat in large amounts or so, it does help you change your life a little bit and so it’s not so bad, but it’s hard to find out which genetic background is causing these things.

Not really. I thought that getting the Nobel Prize was a big interruption in my career, I thought and it was very distracting. It takes a lot of time you know, it just takes time to be honoured, you have to travel and you have to give speeches of things you have, oh it’s so often that you get bored to tears when you hear your own voice. And it’s really taking a lot of your time and there’s no way that during this time you can start something new, I mean you just profit from what you’ve done and there is no time to develop new ideas.

I think a very big curiosity. I’m very curious and I like to understand things and not only science but also other things where I just try to find out why things work or how things work. Science and nature caught my attention as a small child already. I was growing up in a city but we had a garden and I loved the garden and then often on vacation I was at a farm and I loved these animals and plants and so on, so I was attracted very early on and then we had a very good teaching actually at my … I don’t know whether my teachers really had much of a role because I was determined very early, but then I also did music and I did languages and Literature and so on. I have broad interests actually other than science, but this is really true, this curiosity.