Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Alice Roberts
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English scientist Alice Roberts.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
We need to get across the excitement and creativity of science. That it isn't just a list of facts that have already been discovered - but a process, a creative project, that you are generating ideas, testing them and looking for evidence.
It's tempting to look back into history with rose-tinted glasses. Most people in the Stone Age didn't live anywhere near as long as we're living now. Today we can enjoy a more wide-ranging diet and we have fruit and vegetables available all year round.
I'm slightly obsessed with Moomins. They were my specialist subject on BBC's 'Celebrity Mastermind' a few years ago!
Did people's attitudes towards me change after I appeared on TV? Yeah, definitely. During my career I've had some flak - particularly doing television.
I was keen to earn my own money from an early age. I had a job as a paper girl in my local village when I was about 11 - and when I was a bit older, around 15, I was a waitress.
So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people's lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.
I was effectively unemployed after my son was born. I resigned from Bristol because I wasn't happy with the way my career was going then discovered I was pregnant when I was out of a job, but I was freelancing.
Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.
Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it's incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past - not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains - objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.
The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.
I grew up in the Seventies; my dad is an aeronautical engineer and my mum was an English and arts teacher and for a while my family had to exist on one salary.
The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.
In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.
My childhood hero was David Attenborough. He opened my eyes to the wonder of the natural world. In fact, he's still my hero. I interviewed him at the Science Museum in 2015, and he is such a thoughtful, humble and inspiring person.
It's incredible that the layout of the centre of Chester, for instance, is still essentially that of the original Roman fort.
I suppose the thing I'm quite pleased about is that I am, I would hope, a role model for girls and younger women who are thinking about doing science.
If we don't concentrate on resurrecting science, we're not going to be able to compete in a global economy.
I usually turn over when ads appear on television. But - very rarely - I am gripped by a particularly beautiful one, and wonder if art historians of the future will point to these televisual delights as our best art.
I'm strict about taking nuts and dried fruit with me and, if I have access to milk, small packets of porridge to eat in a break.
Spiders are always big in the autumn: they've had all summer to grow.
We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture - the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.
When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!
Whatever happens to science in schools, there's something peculiar going on if students don't see it as creative.
The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you're allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.
Looking in detail at human anatomy, I'm always left with two practically irreconcilable thoughts: our bodies are wonderful, intricate masterpieces; and then - they are cobbled-together, rag-bag, sometimes clunking machines.
Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events - some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.
One of the big factors in me going to an independent school was the bullying at junior school. But it wasn't an easy choice for my parents. And now, I do have issues with independent schools.
Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can't be explained by temperature differences alone. These areas also have a greater proportion of ancient tree lineages surviving: trees have gone extinct at a higher rate in Europe compared with those other areas.
You don't need to go to Rome, Prague or Vienna to find wonderful architecture, amazing stories and suprising, hidden gems.
Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places - packet meals. I'm veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.
In Luke, shepherds go to find Jesus. In Matthew, an unspecified number of wise men, sometimes portrayed as kings, arrive. Nativity plays usually throw all the elements together, with kings and shepherds beating a path to the stable.
The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.
More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.
But I think you can strip the emotion and the subjectivity away while you focus on doing the science - and that's really important.
You're not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you're shutting some people out of particular careers.
Science is about questioning things.
It is so stimulating for young children to hear someone who does science talking about it. It can be so exciting and inspiring. It is easy to get younger school children enthused about science.
I was extremely lucky as I was in one of the last generations of British students who went to university and had my fees paid, and I had a grant as well. I also earned money from my waitressing and designing and selling my own range of dinosaur cards.
So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.
Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.
There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded.
After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.
People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that.
I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.
Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.
Biological anthropology tends to focus on skeletons because that's what is often left behind in the ground, but I am a whole-body anatomist, I'm a clinical anatomist and that's what I teach, I teach it all, not just the skeleton, the muscles and nerves, blood vessels.
I've wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.
I love Roger Deakin's writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, 'Waterlog'.
Then the BBC approached me in 2005 and asked me to be one of the presenters of the series 'Coast', which turned into a very long-running series.
Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it's also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit - and then it's gone.
The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.
Educated guesswork' is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you've got close to the truth.
At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things - teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.
We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don't have enough coming into physics and engineering. It's a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.
I have family connections with Salisbury through my godmother. Her sister lived there, so I have very fond memories of visiting the city as a child.
We need to stop being so profligate with fossil fuels, to rein back climate change and protect biodiversity. We need to work together, globally, and I'm optimistic that we will.
The science of being healthy is well-known. It is not esoteric. There are no magic bullets. If you want to live a long life, we've known the answers for more than a hundred years. It's a wide-ranging diet with as much fruit and veg as you can stuff into yourself, and plenty of exercise. It doesn't even matter what kind of exercise.
You can somehow get access to what is perceived to be a better school by either being religious or appearing to be religious. That is unfair.
I've seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.
I love prehistory - particularly the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. These were times when our ancestors made a revolutionary change from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, and when great migrations of people spread languages - and genes - across Europe.
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