Elizabeth Blackburn: No, the evidence from all sorts of different converging lines of evidence, from paleontology, geology..

•Shekhar Gupta: The fossils and..

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes, observations of the way life does work now, or of the way the molecular signatures in DNA ..it all makes sense and when all the lines of evidence converge and say this synthesis is making sense, it seems foolish to try to say 'Oh, it's a religion'. It's not, it's a lot of lines of evidence.

•Shekhar Gupta: Lots of young kids in India and around the world want to go to America and work in Biology.

Elizabeth Blackburn: Yes

•Shekhar Gupta: Because in America you have labs like the wonderful lab where you work

Elizabeth Blackburn: And we have wonderful labs where we are too, in India.

•Shekhar Gupta: Yes, University of California, and yet many of these Indian kids overseas are not conscious that one-third of the schools in America don't teach evolution.

Elizabeth Blackburn: And so America's hugely diverse and that's the thing I think..

•Shekhar Gupta: But why this, some surveys show that nearly 50 per cent of Americans refuse to accept evolution, which is why George Bush won twice. Is that only religion or something else?

Elizabeth Blackburn: I think it's partly a failure of, as you said, a lot of the education isn't as good as we would like to see, which is, you want to education to develop people's minds so that they will think well and I think sometimes education systems can be a little lazy or a little less adequate . On the other hand, the range is very high and so there are many very good schools where people ofcourse think about this, they realise that science is not religion. Science is a process of thinking about how do things work and religion is about accepting faith and accepting authority.

... contd.