Our long, flexible lumbar spines are great in many ways - they help us to run efficiently, for instance. But they have their drawbacks. The lumbar vertebrae are under great strain, and as we age, the ligaments that hold the pulpy centres of the intervertebral discs in place dry out.
— Alice Roberts
After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband's home-made pizza.
Science is about questioning things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s incredible that the layout of the centre of Chester, for instance, is still essentially that of the original Roman fort.
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.
If we don’t concentrate on resurrecting science, we’re not going to be able to compete in a global economy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The human knee is complex and prone to failure in a variety of ways; there’s a lot of muscle mass low down in the legs which makes moving them fairly inefficient.
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.
People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that.
The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.
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.
The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The paleo diet is utter nonsense - it is such pseudoscience.
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'.
You don’t need to go to Rome, Prague or Vienna to find wonderful architecture, amazing stories and suprising, hidden gems.
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.
More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.
In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
