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When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.

I have always been interested - indeed, waylaid - by the leading edges of technology, even during my Ph.D. years when I pioneered (but did not publish) agarose gel electrophoresis for RNA fractionation. Also, much later, I was instrumental in showing that Green Fluorescent Protein and RNAi could be made to work in mammalian cells.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

The nucleic acids have considerable biological importance because of their role in cell growth and in the transmission of hereditary characters.

In my lab, we're interested in the transition from chemistry to early biology on the early earth.

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

I think it was this curiosity about the natural world which awoke my early interest in science.

I've always been fascinated by what you can learn from looking into your DNA.