The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers. But that's not the same thing as saying they're incompatible. It's just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

I was an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises. A message would go round the department: 'Please give a list of your recent publications.' And I would send back a statement: 'None.'

It's nice to be right sometimes.

I was already, I think, at the age of 18, showing signs of being incompetent in the lab.

For a long time, I felt instinctively irritated - sometimes repelled - by scientific friends' automatic use of the word 'mechanism' for automatic bodily processes. A machine was man-made; it was not a sentient being; a man was not a machine.

Of course, not everybody's willing to go out and do the experiments, but for the people who are willing to go out and do that, - if the experiments don't work, then it means it's not science.

On June 22, 1793, Vancouver's Discovery and Chatham anchored in Klekane Inlet. Archibald Menzies, the ship's botanist, wrote that on the evening of June 28, they were visited by eight natives in two canoes who brought them two large salmon. This is the first known published encounter with the Haisla people.

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