“If you like, there is a Guinness time. The reason for that it’s fundamental. It is not that we have to keep shortening the time. It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them.”

We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

Invest in basic research and recruit the best minds.

As a child, I thought I was immortal, but now I recognize how limited a time we all have. As a child, success meant scoring A on every exam, but now I take it to mean good health, close family and friends, achieve- ments in my work, and helping others.

I want to really focus on doing this two things I really would like to focus on science and the excitement of science and to help with science.

One of the things I enjoy most is to be left alone with a book.

Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can’t be too narrow on science.

I came from Egypt and I owe Egypt a lot to what I am now.

I do feel quite strongly about this that probably one of the things that unfortunately this age now to get a Nobel Prize is to really use part of it to help the young people get excited about science.

Perhaps the most valuable thing he taught me (his father) was that there is no contradiction between devotion to work and enjoyment of life and people

The fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations and this speeds is about a kilometre per second.

And the other thing also which I’m hoping for is that the government in Egypt is willing and interested in promoting science and technology and this is an ideal time now to be able to do something.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that’s really not the way it worked.

So, that’s my intention to focus my efforts there and I hope I will be able to do so.

I do have a concern however, humanity has a great way of adapting and I’m sure scientists of the future, probably after I leave this planet, earth will have a new way of dealing with the internet but I do have a concern in the transition period.

There are many, many books I’ve read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something.