I’ve done almost 4,000 operations for brain tumors. I’m thinking of what’s going to happen ten or 12 steps before. I’m anticipating what’s going to happen in the operation, and I’m comfortable with where we are.

Perhaps one character trait which does help is the ability to focus, and perhaps to be a little stubborn. If I learned something in class that I only partly understood, I wasn't satisfied until I was able to work the whole thing out; it would bother me that the explanation wasn't clicking together like it should. So I'd often spend a lot of time on very simple things until I could understand them backwards and forwards, which really helps when one then moves on to more advanced parts of the subject.

Being a scientist is about resilience because science is exploring the unknown, just as an immigrant is exploring the unknown. In both, you are on an uncertain journey and you have to find your own North Star.

Well, it wasn’t a game to me. We were taught, interestingly enough, given the current state of political affairs, that you should try not to hate anyone, that hatred was a sickness and a weakness, and that there were very few people who were completely evil, so you should go out of your way to figure out what makes them tick and see if you can find some way to communicate with them. I learned that more with my family — even before I was old enough to know what I was doing —when I was eating meals, my grandmother’s brother and his family had — they had four kids, and they always fed a lot of people, and we ate there a lot, and they would talk about whatever had happened that week. And the kids could talk, but they had to prove they could listen first, so before I could tell a story I had to recount what I had just heard, because if you weren’t listening, nobody wanted to listen to you. And it was like a primer in human nature, and I was fortunate in having people all along the way who tried to help explain other people to me, and I developed an obsessive interest in doing it.

Jason Queally, a former teammate. He is older than me and was Olympic champion in Sydney. The way he mentored me, even though he knew I would be a rival, was amazing.

The six Olympic gold medals, because at school I was never great at sport. When I look back on my career I think, how on Earth did that happen?

The London terror attack on 7/7 in 2005. I was in London the day before for the Olympic bid. When we won I thought, “I should stay over – it will be a great party tonight.” But I decided to go back to Manchester for training. Bombs went off on what would have been my route to the station.

A road track car, a Porsche GT3. I’ve done the 24-hour race in Le Mans, which was a dream come true.

Scotland’s rugby captain. My hero Gavin Hastings was captain when he came to our school for a training session when I was 10 or 11. I met him and was blown away.

Max Levy, a German sprint cyclist who came second behind me a lot.