Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

A four-letter alphabet called DNA.

I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.

I felt cheated by the way grown-ups told me that the future of the world was bleak when I became a teenager in the 1970s. The pollution explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. I genuinely want the next generation, my own kids, to know that actually it's possible that the future might be better than the past.

It-was a tiny mollusc that caused Walter, grandfather of the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, to forge a brief link with the greatest biologist of the nineteenth: Charles Darwin. . . . . . We know this because later that day he wrote hesitantly to Darwin to report what he had found.

As a small boy Francis Crick had been haunted by a fear that by the time he grew up everything would have been discovered. Inspired by Arthur Mee