I turned 65 last year, and each year I get more and more interested in human health. For most people it happens around age 50, but I've always been a slow learner. It's critical in terms of the cost of health care.

In the past, geneticists have looked at so-called disease genes, but a lot of people have changes in their genes and don't get these diseases. There have to be other parts of physiology and genetics that compensate.

My early years were hardly a model of focus, discipline, and direction. No one who met me as a teenager could have imagined my going into research and making important discoveries. No one could have predicted the arc of my career.

If I could change the science system, my prescription for changing the whole thing would be organising it around big goals and building teams to do it.

The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.

I've only experienced it a few times where you get to have a thing that simultaneously gets some critical respect, some critical success, while also having sales success. Sometimes you get one or the other if you're lucky.

With success always comes criticism. I've been criticized every year of my life.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative'.