There are many battles. There’s so much that needs to be done. We need to protect the environment. Save this little planet. Not just this little piece of real estate we call America, but save the planet.

Well, I think the most single important issue today is to make sure that nuclear weapons will not proliferate beyond the eight, or nine, countries that already have nuclear weapons; and absolutely make sure that none of these nuclear weapons or this nuclear material will fall into the hands of any extremist or terrorist group, because if they got hold of this material, they would use it. That would be the beginning of the end for civilisation as we know it.

We have all these interesting challenges now. No one knows whether automation and robotics, nanotechnology, will kill more jobs than it creates. If it does, that presents a serious problem. What are we going to do? Have a few of us work to support everybody else, or shorten the workweek for everybody? If so, how do we get from here to there? No one knows yet how we’re going to stop cyber terrorism from wrecking honest discourse in democracy and maybe putting our very lives at risk.

we know the fish, we know the worm, we know the fly, but we don’t know the links between and we don’t know, when we go back to the branches in evolution, we really don’t know what happened there when they branched and how they divert and what is the major drive for evolution.

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

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 did not meet Franklin but admired her work and scientific attitude. I did meet Hodgkin and learned a lot from her.

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.

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.

But you know that there are so many people that are equal to us or better that didn’t get the prize. You cannot go round the whole world and ask “are you better than me?”