My own mother, a beautiful, uneducated woman from a working-class New York family, and my father, a young southern man from a poor sharecropping family who entered the Marines at the age of 17, represented far more to each other than just romance.

FORBES: What to do when the transformative moment arrives

Poor man, he was interrupted about every five minutes by admirers or well wishers, including my predecessor on X-Change, Quentin Cooper.

BBC: The BA Science Festival