Alice Roberts Quotes

Alice Roberts

Profession : Scientist

Birth : May 19, 1973

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.

Alice Roberts

I was a goth in my student days. I dyed my hair black, but it came out grey, with a blue scalp. Then I dyed it red and it came out fuschia pink.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

In our evolutionary narratives, the organism itself often seems to play a passive role: a powerless victim, almost, of changes to its environment or mutations in its genes.

Alice Roberts

I was a fairly strict vegetarian - I ate eggs and dairy products but nothing that would involve killing an animal to furnish the food on my plate.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

The environment would be better off and everyone would be healthier if we stopped eating meat.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don't agree with that.

Alice Roberts

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.

Alice Roberts

The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn. But there are splashes of crimson or rust-red colours from a few indigenous trees, like the rowan, as well as from introduced species, like the North American red oak.

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts

As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn't just a pigment, it's a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!

Alice Roberts

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.

Alice Roberts