Growing up, my mates and I would have rather been Sid Vicious or members of the Royal Family.

I think that London is very much like that. I find there's humour in the air and people are interesting. And I think that it's a place which is constantly surprising. The worst thing about it? I think it can be smug and aggressive.

I do notice that when I've been away and I come back to London. People look at you. People are ready to pick arguments.

People have the idea of missionaries as going out with the Bible and hitting natives with it. It's not really what they were doing. They were all doing something rather different.

I love acting, I really do, I've always loved doing it, and it's a joy to be asked to do this. I mean, to do Beatrice, for God's sake, it is the best comedy Shakespeare role for a woman, and to be asked to do it.

To my astonishment, everything that I had assumed was now questioned by the findings. What started off as a search for identity that appeared to be purely Scottish in origin ended up as a discovery of my migrant roots - indeed an understanding that almost all of our families, at some stage, have been migrants - and my European roots.

The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing.

I realized immediately that this was a terribly important discovery, but I didn't realize how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.