It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.

Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.