When Jeff Zaslow's column appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), about a dozen publishers emailed me, asked if I would be willing to write a book based on it. (I found this laughable, since at the time the palliative chemo was not yet working, and I thought I was down to about 6 weeks of good health). When the palliative chemo started working and we had some breathing room, I mentioned this to Jai, and she told me she wanted to do it. She was, in fact, quite emphatic. We had always talked about my "writing the manual" for her and the kids in my remaining time, and Jai felt that if it were a "real" project, I might take it much more seriously.

I have so many ideas and things bouncing around in my head that I’ve been wanting to write for years, but there are only so many hours in the day. I have books in me; I have stories I need to tell, both fiction and nonfiction; I have projects I want to do that would take me in different directions.

The songs aren't all written. ... You don't know where they're going to go. That's the fun of the job. There's the usual malarkey, the usual gags, the usual stuff. And also a few songs written by way of kind of being farewells to people, goodbyes to people, gratitude to people. Expressions of, you know, this was a nice deal, life. But I don't think it's exactly weighted with sentimentality.

I still don’t understand everything about the ribosome. I must say that the more lectures I give and the more questions that I get, the more thoughts they trigger. And also, we are now interested in the proto-ribosome, how life started. So we are trying to understand this and this really excites me, not just from the point of view of philosophy, we are trying to show it.

And I still remember, and that's the honest truth, as we were leaving his office, he said, 'Well, I give you a fifty-fifty chance to come out alive'. That was Malaita at that time, and... and you can check in the books and will find that that was the... that's why nobody had ever collected there. Well, we made the first collection.

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.

I always think about things, and if something puzzles me… Well, that of course was one of Darwin’s secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that’s true even today.

My father had a wonderful library, and we always bought books galore, and I devoured all the books of explorers that went to various places in the world. I admired what Humboldt had done and Bates and Darwin and the Swedish explorers, Sven Hedin and others. I was dreaming all the time about someday being an explorer, going to the tropics, going to the jungles, seeing new things, discovering strange animals and so forth, but of course it was a dream world.

Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.

One of the answers is that very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often.