There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.

I'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.

I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences.

I'm doing a book, 'Chasing Science,' about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport.

My mom studied biology and my dad studied chemistry and some physics and he is a physician, but he had a very strong interest in astronomy and astrophysics and exploration in general.

I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants, rather than from animal tissues, was a landmark in the history of medicine as well as the history of chemistry.

I was a political science major in college because that's where my head was.