Alice Roberts

I’m a firm believer in teaching children to manage risk. ”

There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded. ”

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part. ”

Looking in detail at human anatomy, I’m always left with two practically irreconcilable thoughts: our bodies are wonderful, intricate masterpieces; and then - they are cobbled-together, rag-bag, sometimes clunking machines." ”

The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there’s a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient. ”

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees. ”

I’ve wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years." ”

Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out. ”

I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress. ”

It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion. ”