"It is the grace of God. Also, if God gives you the grace to live long, you have to work hard too. There should also be a lifestyle adjustment. It is a gift of God. You can’t rule out the efficacy of prayers."

"I love music. I love classical music. That was the thing that first brought us (my husband and me) together. My husband loved classical music and I still do. I have a library in Ibadan for the collection of classical music."

"We want solutions that are green and based on nature. We aim to do no harm in everything we do."

"They say it gives wrinkles but I am lucky no wrinkle…(laughter). Laughter Cheers you more when you are angry before you blow up. Smile more and laughter refreshes not just the soul but the way you look on the outside."

"Being responsible is more important than fighting. It's more enduring."

"Mother nature called on me to be a steward."

"So for me as a mother…what I sow now in terms of feeding my children properly with nutritious food will remain embedded even at old age."

"The power of science is that people can prove that this wasn't done based on bias or someone's personal interests."

"People get excited and feel like scientists, because they're working with us researchers to fix the problem."

"We also learn from them. They have planting techniques that we don't know - they teach us how to make the solution work in their area."

"If you don't engage with people properly, you run the risk of being kidnapped. First I meet the community chief, the women's leader, the youth leaders."

"I stayed to work in Niger Delta, because my mission is to make my country great."

"From pilot studies, we have reached 75% to 80% of heavy metals removal and this biological process can be repeated several times over until desired results are achieved."

"We are not here for battle. We just want people to be responsible."

"The day we met, it was like I met an old friend. It was fantastic. We started talking as if we had always known each other. He was wonderful. When we met later, I read his papers and critiqued them. It was fantastic."

"Science is the bedrock of development. The way we live is a biological process. Young girls should be interested in science. Man can crack it; woman can crack it! We have to work hard for what we believe in."

"In joint grant application preparation, many investigators think women should not be the Principal Investigators, citing society-assigned roles to women to manage welfare issues and not be a chief planner. Non-flexible work schedules and non-gender-friendly management policies have also not helped the female scientist."

"It feels good. I was always first position in the class for maths and physics. It made me stand out. My father encouraged me, always made me feel like a superstar. I went to as high school specialised in science. I got to love the profession of scientist. I did industrial training (in Nigeria, students have a period of hands on industrial training) with a subsidiary of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and experienced hands on environmental monitoring."

"Some professional colleagues have shoved aside some of my position papers because they come from a ‘women’. We, as women scientists, often get a ‘second-citizen role’ in science events, activities, and jobs. When people push for a quota for a woman among invited speakers for example, I feel terrible as it is a conscious bias."

"The environment needs to be protected. The degradation has gone beyond what you can sweep under the carpet. I discovered the indigenes are part of the pollution. They tap into the pipeline and do illegal, artisanal refining, but without the technical know-how."

"Evidence has shown that women have the capacity to excel in any field of research provided they have adequate training, enabling environment, and interest."

"I have a peaceful home and I am known in my field of phytoremediation and in community engagement."

"How did you become involved in scientific research?"

"Increase the intensity of advocacy for gender equality in our society. Develop the confidence of mid-career and advanced women scientists to be mentors, as younger female scientists are more motivated when accomplished women scientists serve as mentors, speakers, and leaders in their field."

"To kill them you have to use chemotherapy, which has all the side effects and may not always work."

"When people push for a quota for a woman among invited speakers for example, I feel terrible as it is a conscious bias. In joint grant application preparation, many investigators think women should not be the Principal Investigators, citing society-assigned roles to women to manage welfare issues and not be a chief planner."

"The estrogen receptor negative tumors are estrogen independent."

"Follow your dream. Your passion will sustain you through the thick and thin of science and do not forget to deliberately have mentors and champions. These individuals will always fan your flame into fire."

"I was a curious child of educated parents who thought I was a scientist in the making. They sent me to a specialised Science High School and my interest grew stronger and here I am today."

"Crude oil has many components. In the soil, it leaves high concentration of heavy metals, which are inorganic and cannot be degraded by micro-organisms. The current practice by polluters is to use excavations, but that is only shifting the goal post. The goal is to reduce the contaminants to the barest minimum. Polluted land can become viable for agriculture again. I will study a similar process in Poland."

"This is probably the first time any of us would be gathering to witness the launch of a book by a 95-year old. It is an event we all will remember for a long time."

"Tumors that are estrogen-receptor positive depend on estrogen to grow."

"We’ve been very interested in familial breast cancer and the contribution of genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 that predispose families to breast cancer. We’re very interested in looking at the genetic basis of breast cancer in young women. As a result of that investigation, we’re hoping to develop better tools and better methods to manage triple-negative breast cancer, because that’s what we see to be over-represented in young African American women and women with BRCA1 mutations."

"medical school in Nigeria, we were always taught that prevention was better than a cure."

"People in Africa have been understudied, and even African-Americans in this country have been understudied."

"Instead of waiting for the patients to be diagnosed with cancer, I am increasingly passionate about trying to prevent it."

"The more compelling horror stories I heard from my patients."

"The more compelled I became to figure it out."

"I thought that if I committed myself to identifying risk factors and then to determining how to lower individual risk, then that would really be a lifelong pursuit."

"We're going to assemble a group from totally different environments to see what might be the common thread."

"Right now, most women in the world are diagnosed with breast cancer at an advanced stage."

"We need to accelerate prevention that can be adopted in low-resource settings or adopted in this country as a way to help low-income women care for themselves."

"To develop a personalized way to identify every woman at high risk, whether African-American or Jewish or Italian or Ukrainian, so that they could go in and have their doctor develop a personalized approach for them."

"The hope for precision medicine is to have the right drug for the right person at the right time,"

"There have been very few studies of women across different populations, so that’s why everyone has focused on my work,. But there are women all over the world Indian women, Hispanic women who develop triple-negative breast cancer, and most of these women didn’t know they were at risk for it."

"Triple-negative breast cancer is not the majority of breast cancer. But if we have drugs that can target the genetic abnormalities in these tumors, and we are able to rapidly conduct global clinical trials, not only can we get studies done quickly, but we can also make it possible for women all over the world to participate in the cures of tomorrow."

"By disseminating such information in front of the community of oncologists, we were given the opportunity to change practice"

"These cancers may be more common among African-American women, but our discovery was really that there are genetic risk factors for breast cancer in all populations."

"Every country has its peculiar issues to deal with; I think, however, that in Nigeria it has become easier for us to blame our problems on the leadership. Even so, I would argue that those being led play a role, as well. Let us step back, if we may, into history for a moment… The first crop of leadership in this country was of great significance, emerging at a critical period in our nation when we had just won independence from Great Britain. This group of leaders took on their role very seriously, and so did the citizenry. Unfortunately, since then, we seemed to have lost something crucial in the nation building process that we have not since been able to regain."

"If we want to develop the agricultural sector for instance, there should be a resolution on what cash crops should be grown, and this should be capitalized upon in specific zones once an agreement is reached to begin exportation."