Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible - to live in the truth, as I say - to get out of the lie.

When I was young, they thought I was from outer space. I was the only gay person they probably knew, and they struggled with that. Everybody knew I was gay. They just didn't want to talk about it.

It's not so easy to be gay or even a woman in some places in the world, and in many countries, it's illegal to be gay. You can be put to death. It's a global struggle. A human rights struggle on a global scale.

Our movement is evolving. The movement to liberate our sexuality as a human right, that's an ongoing struggle.

I think people love fundamental science.

My father was not only a planetary scientist and a great popularizer of science, but he thought very deeply about the world. He was a scholar, he studied history. He taught a class in critical thinking, and he was very, very aware of the directions we might go.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word 'stimulus,' my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

As a child, I envisioned a career in the hard sciences. In sixth grade, I was buying college chemistry textbooks.