My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.

I was not proficient in Latin and so was not able to go to Oxford or Cambridge. However, I did enter the first-rate chemistry honours program at the University of Manchester in 1950, where the professors were E.R.H. Jones and M.G. Evans, and graduated in 1953, with the financial support of a Blackpool Education Committee Scholarship.

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.

Sharon Shinn is a lover of words and a builder of worlds. She makes science-fiction seem like fantasy. Her characters jump off the page, finding their way under your skin and into your heart.

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.