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Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

I always spend time exploring the customs and attitudes of the countries I'm using for locations, and interviewing the people who live there. I've visited over 90 countries thus far.

I think that one of the main privileges of what I do, which I am just starting to learn, is to have the ability to travel all over the world and experience different cultures.

There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic - like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it's there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.

After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.

I've always enjoyed traveling and having experience with different cultures and different people. But it's also a wonderful thing to be able to benefit and enable research, not only in our country but around the world.

People who don't travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what's in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.

I've been all over the world on my own because, as a scientist, you travel a great deal if your work is reasonably successful or published. I get invitations to go to all sorts of strange countries where I would mostly be by myself and just meet other people there, instead of having travelling companions.

It's wonderful to learn about new cultures and to be able to travel easily to so many countries.