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I think I succeeded in getting the Egyptian people excited about the importance of science, and this is the only way Egypt can get out of this dark ages.

I was an anthropology major in college, and I've had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

My dad was a surgeon in Egypt. He was a general surgeon. As a little boy I always admired what he was doing, and I wanted to do surgery.

At school I briefly wanted to be a palaeontologist, but I was no good at chemistry and physics.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

On bad days, I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts, and then I think, 'Yeah, right, I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.

I became interested, through reading the works of some novelist, in Egyptology and made a study of the pyramids. It was just a hobby, but I had a desire to know all I could about everything I could.

I was sure I was going to be a doctor of global health or tropical medicine in some underdeveloped country.