I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

I've had a very unusual background in science - not the usual route of planning on being a scientist from age 3. I think my story shows that success is more about personal motivation and determination than it is about where you were born or what your economic status was.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

I see courage everywhere I go in Africa. Fearless human rights activists in Darfur. Women peace advocates in eastern Congo. Former child soldiers in Northern Uganda who now are helping other former child soldiers return to civilian life.

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.

You can have X amount of pounds in your bank every month, but if you're not happy, and you're not finding peace in what you're doing, it doesn't really matter.

The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.