I'm on a crusade to get movie directors to get their science right because, more often than they believe, the science is more extraordinary than anything they can invent.
Science is an enterprise that should be cherished as an activity of the free human mind. Because it transforms who we are, how we live, and it gives us an understanding of our place in the universe.
The center line of science literacy - which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point - is how you think.
Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.
Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.
I learned easily and had time to follow my inclination for sports (light athletics and skiing) and chemistry, which I taught myself by reading all textbooks I could get.
If a Martian came down to Earth and watched television, he'd come to conclusion that all the world's society is based on Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. He'd be amazed that our society hasn't collapsed.
It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.
There's always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature and then science-fiction televised shows or movies, partly because they have a different dynamic.
This field is not necessarily glamorous, nor does it often produce immediate results, but it seeks to increase our basic understanding of living processes.
You can't come away with this cosmic perspective thinking that you are better than others and want to fight. That's why you'll never have astrophysicists leading nations into war.
No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?
In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' ...
I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.
The sky above the island was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel—which is to say it was a bright, cheery blue.
By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.
Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.
Paradoxically, no such embargo exists for the drugs and therapies that have revolutionized the treatment of serious diseases although many of them were created with the same technologies.
Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.
The final outcome cannot be known, either to the originator of a new theory, or to his colleagues and critics, who are bent on falsifying it. Thus, the scientific innovator may feel all the more lonely and uncertain.
After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.
