Everything about us black people is complicated, us being here, being a minority, being a woman, all those things are complicated.

I was the jokester, the one who made the family laugh.

I was kind of a bully, even though I'm tiny, 5' 2". As a child, I'd boss other kids around and dress my little brother up, just putting on shows, singing and dressing up.

I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists.

I've been fortunate to work with Alfre Woodard and Jeffrey Wright; people who are artists, have careers, longevity and full lives. That looks good to me.

My mom has an English accent, so we always referred to the trunk as the 'boot.' And then, suddenly, we moved to Georgia and I would say things like 'open the boot' with a bit of an accent, and I quickly realized I had to adapt; that kind of thing will get you beat up!

Stone Mountain, Georgia, still had Ku Klux Klan marches, and I had a wild and courageous mother who'd put us in the car to watch them. She wanted us to know those things existed.

There are expectations in how you play your character as a black woman, to be sassy and the same kind of feel, as if there are no quirky black women. I struggle with those things constantly, trying to add dimension to my work, and that's the goal, too.

When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.

In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.

As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions.

In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.

It is often said that science must avoid any conclusions which smack of the supernatural.

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

Skin is made in large measure of a protein called collagen.

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.