I would like to write a play which doesn’t disappoint me 20 years later.

We have all these interesting challenges now. No one knows whether automation and robotics, nanotechnology, will kill more jobs than it creates. If it does, that presents a serious problem. What are we going to do? Have a few of us work to support everybody else, or shorten the workweek for everybody? If so, how do we get from here to there? No one knows yet how we’re going to stop cyber terrorism from wrecking honest discourse in democracy and maybe putting our very lives at risk.

I'm making cheap electricity,

We can’t delude ourselves into thinking that anything we or any other business does is “sustainable”. The best we can do is minimize the harm we do to the planet. We’ll do what we can to clean up our own house and convince other businesses and suppliers to use cleaner energy and more responsible materials, but it’s a never-ending summit. The work is never done.

But you know that there are so many people that are equal to us or better that didn’t get the prize. You cannot go round the whole world and ask “are you better than me?”

It is possible to be a good scientist, a good mother and have a family and even bake a cake.

I look for how to get out of it. I try to use here [points to her head]. I tried to read, I tried to talk to others. I tried my best to get out of it. I had lots of times climbing one Everest to find that there is a bigger Everest, but don’t you find your life like this too?

First of all, I believe that the results of science should be fully given to the community. Fully. Absolutely. And all types of competition such as who did it first and “I cannot tell him because he will copy me” and so on – these are not arguments. Society financed this science, if not directly, then the education and the way I got there, so society should get back what I found. It is not my finding. In this, I am not very popular, I must say.

I still don’t understand everything about the ribosome. I must say that the more lectures I give and the more questions that I get, the more thoughts they trigger. And also, we are now interested in the proto-ribosome, how life started. So we are trying to understand this and this really excites me, not just from the point of view of philosophy, we are trying to show it.

When I was a child and interested in discoveries, the first book that made an impression on me was called “Discoveries of the World” but it wasn’t about geography, it was about Marie Curie! [laughs] And then there is a beautiful Italian story – from the mountains in Italy to the Pyrenees, a kid goes to look for a flower with a golden heart inside for his ill mother. This made a big impression on me.  I also read lots of Isreali authors that you probably haven’t heard of.