It was all about flying round the world, working hard, being on the cover of Vogue, making money. It wasn't fun. It was exhausting, but I was young and convinced I knew best.

I am a very open person, and I'm always nervous of being misconstrued. Sitting in the middle of a restaurant makes me nervous. I feel like I'm being judged. And it's funny that I should feel that way.

But things move in circles: one minute it's the models who are famous, then it's the actresses, then it's the designers.

Rod has such a wicked sense of humour. I loved him very much.

The public schools tend to teach little kids from when they are very young about the whole universe without God and that God cannot be in science. They are indoctrinating children in an atheistic religious view of things.

I felt I ought not to be wasting time, and I hurried to graduate from high school to enroll at UCSD. I also hurried to finish college, to go on to higher studies. By the time I was in my teens, I had a strong sense of mission, wanting to discover something important or solve a major problem in biology or medicine.

I studied physics at university, and I'm still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.

What's interesting about science is that we're constantly discovering new things about the universe, about ourselves, about our bodies, about diseases, about the possibilities of the future. It's amazing. Science is one of the coolest things about being a human being - without a doubt.