As a child in the early 1980s, I tended to talk with things in my mouth - food, dentist's tubes, balloons that would fly away, whatever - and if no one else was around, I'd talk anyway.

In 'The Violinist's Thumb,' I talk about the poignancy of cells leaking across the placenta into both the mother and the child.

Medieval alchemists, despite their lust for gold, considered mercury the most potent and poetic substance in the universe. As a child, I would have agreed with them.

Geneticists in the early 1900s believed that nature - in an effort to avoid wasting precious space within chromosomes - would pack as many genes into each chromosome as possible.

Microchimeric sharing means that, even if the mother loses a child, she'll have a small memento of him or her secreted away inside her. Similarly, a bit of our mothers live on in all of us no matter how long ago Mom died.

If studying the periodic table taught me nothing else, it's that the credulity of human beings for periodic table panaceas is pretty much boundless.