My father died when I was seven, leaving a widow and five sons, ranging in age from five to seventeen. My mother was the most highly-disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.

The subsistence level is only a conventional idea, and conventions change.

Education is the great growth industry of the Third World. Since the Second World War, we have multiplied the number of children in school by four, with even larger multiples for secondary and university education.

We cannot give our students all that they expect, whether by way of the quality of their schooling or by way of the jobs that they were hoping to get. Student frustration is a worldwide phenomenon, pushing our societies into adjusting faster than they are used to.

Typically, you learn how to cook, but you don't know why. We were looking for a deeper understanding of what was happening to our food as we roasted it, boiled it, grilled it, chopped it, etc. And it turned out, as we began to really say what is cooking, what does it mean to cook, there's a lot of science involved.

By isolating the issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, climate change, environment, governance, economics, catastrophe and whatever other problems the present embodies or the future may bring, science fiction can do what Dickens and Sinclair did: make real the consequences of social injustice or human folly.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.