•Shekhar Gupta: You know, we'll bring you back to George W Bush and those 8 years..

Elizabeth Blackburn: Oh no please don't!

•Shekhar Gupta: No, we won't bring back the years!

Elizabeth Blackburn: Oh I'm so happy to think in future terms now.

•Shekhar Gupta: We won't bring those years back, I think the people of America have made sure of that. But just in that background, how wonderful to be having this conversation, and that too in New Delhi in the gardens of National Institute of Immunology just when the world is celebrating Charles Darwin's 200th birth anniversary.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes, so appropriate because you know what that brought was really a sort of freeing up of how you think about the natural world and intellectually it tapped into such a lot of scholarship that it freed people into thinking about things, which really has underpinned Biology.

•Shekhar Gupta: That's your world down to its smallest unit, the smallest..not just a cell but now an enzyme..

Elizabeth Blackburn: An enzyme or a group of enzymes carrying out a function within a cell.

•Shekhar Gupta: Because you know it's very interesting ..200 years since Darwin and yet the debate goes on because there's still lots of people who believe in the theory of Intelligent Design that life is so complex that it couldn't have happened just because of evolution. Why?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Well it's an interesting mixture. I think it's partly there's certain social groups of people who feel very suspicious about science and its methods and would rather not deal with the fact that it's sometimes more difficult to grasp ideas. And sometimes I think faith is almost, I understand it's a human characteristic to want to have faith of various kinds but sometimes..

... contd.