•Shekhar Gupta: Are you religious?

Elizabeth Blackburn: Actually I find great wonder in nature and I see why people have interest in something, I hate to use the word spiritual but something like that, something beyond yourself. I think that's very human and in my case I find the wonder is in nature but I don't have any formal religious..

•Shekhar Gupta: But scientists also go to church or to temples.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes but I think the kind of thing where someone uses faith as an intellectual laziness, I think that's the thing where if somebody really really wanted to know how ..

•Shekhar Gupta: Intellectual alibi

Elizabeth Blackburn: Alibi or just ..if you really wanted to know how things work you would try and think through really is whether Darwinism well-based on reasoned.. taking in all the evidence and looking at it all or not.

And I think those who reject it are not actually taking on that intellectual.argument.

•Shekhar Gupta: Because many of Darwin's critics would say that you guys also take Darwinism as a scripture.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Not at all. Every scientist just takes a theory as a working model, it's just a framework in which you say 'well does this go towards trying to find out the nature of things' and in fact what people take seriously is the body of evidence that led Darwin to synthesise this sort of concept which ..

•Shekhar Gupta: And nothing's happened since then to contradict it, only to strengthen it.

... contd.