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

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

Biology has tended to be an observational science, and deriving things from first principles has not been possible in the past, but I hate to predict the future on that.

Our world is built on biology and once we begin to understand it, it then becomes a technology.

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.

I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree with me if I say that whatever we were able to achieve in our later years had its origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hopes and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students.

Our approach to medicine is very 19th-century. We are still in the dark ages. We really need to get to the molecular level so that we are no longer groping about in the dark.

Many have gone on to do important scientific work but all remember those wonderful times when we and our science were young and our excitement in meeting new challenges knew no bounds.