Wisdom in fragments

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

Hot and humid climates tend to promote a kind of right-wing, slightly authoritarian politics — because hot and humid environments are also pathogen-rich, and over thousands of years, societies in those climates have developed what scientists call behavioural immunity.

Most studies today show that our political leaning is at least 50 per cent genetic in origin — genetics is as important, if not more important, to how you vote than your cultural context, your economic context, and all the evidence you engage with in the world.

I am still a physiologist. I am not absorbed by the pharmaceutical industry. I have stuck to my laboratory, to the science.

It should remain a prescription drug — because you need instructions at the same time on what to do.

We have a compound that, as one of its main functions, really addresses precisely this. It remedies the inflammation and the toxic consequences of obesity.

All of this was unexpected. The entire development was unexpected. Nobody could really believe that this would happen.

Nobody in the beginning believed that it was possible to create an obesity treatment with this kind of drug. Everybody would say, “oh, it’s their own fault.”

It was possible to get up to 0.4 milligrammes per day, and all of a sudden there was a 14 to 15 per cent weight loss. That changed the whole picture.

What we have in the colon may actually be a kind of defence system regulating the mucosal integrity of the body.

It is, in fact, what we call an enterogastrone hormone — an ileal brake hormone — that sends the signal that enough is enough, stop.

People often say to me, 'You must be so pleased with the effects your work has had.' But the daily feeling is frustration. There's much more to do. For kidney transplantation, I could tell you about victory after victory in a war we're losing -- because the shortage of transplants is growing rather than shrinking, as diabetes and hypertension become an epidemic. There's so much to do, so little time, and it's so hard to be persuasive.

Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for IVF. By then, millions of children had been born through it. On the very day his Nobel was announced, the Vatican said giving him the prize was 'completely out of order'. Same person, same achievement, same day -- celebrated as a saviour by some, condemned as a murderer by others. That is what a real moral controversy looks like. It doesn't dissolve, even after the technology has changed millions of lives.

There's an Overton window of policies you can make, but it's a wider window than the policies you can run your political campaign on. It's more a matter of legislators than politicians -- even though they're the same people.

The Red Crescent sheik said: 'That would just be giving his life back. We could do that.' A WHO official, told that the same Filipino patient would have died without our exchange, exclaimed, 'He should be dead!'