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.
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.
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.
More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is 'Question Time'. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.
Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.
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.
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.
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.
Pagan Romans started their midwinter celebrations with the feast of Saturnalia on 17 December, ending them with a new year festival, the Kalendae Januariae, at the start of January - both were celebrated with parties and the exchange of gifts.
When I asked what people would change about their bodies on Twitter, the birthing process was an extremely popular response!
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was in my 20s, and even though I was studying medicine, I didn't ever really think that my body would fail. Now I'm in my 40s, I have to face a different reality - I, like everyone else, am slowly falling apart.
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.