What made you turn your hand to fiction?
Skrine: I started medical editing and writing by mistake. After offering to stick on stamps for the newly formed Association of Family Planning Doctors my name appeared on their Journal as Assistant Editor. To my surprise I discovered I had some ability to organise ideas and, after editing a series of books on Psychosexual Medicine, I wrote my own Blocks and Freedoms in Sexual Life pub. Radcliffe Medical Press.

This book exhausted all I had to say to the Profession but I missed the writing. I tried short stories and poetry but after taking three Open College of the Arts courses and obtaining an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University College I settled for writing novels.

Who inspires you as an author?
Skrine: Modern authors I enjoy are Rose Tremain, Pat Barker, Annie Proulx, Khaled Husseini, Alice Sebold. I am rediscovering Elizabeth Gaskell and enjoy her strong female characters in their vivid social settings.

Was your choice of genetic engineering as a theme due to a pesonal interest in the area?
Skrine: No. Genetic engineering was an example of my more general interest in the tension between scientific advances, with their potential for good, and the anti-scientific retreat into fundamentalist ideologies.

How do you think your medical career helps or hinders you as a fiction writer?
Skrine: The stories that I listened to, in my chosen branch of medicine, have lingered in my mind. When I started to write I found myself working into the characters from their sexual hang-ups and out to their interaction with others. Relationships have always fascinated me but I discovered that, in my hands, they were not enough to make a gripping tale. My interests widened so that I could place the action in a setting of contemporary importance.

At the same time I learnt that my scientific training can make me too logical and detached so that I have to make a conscious effort to free my imagination in order to enter into a scene in all its detail.

Do you have any other projects you are working on at the moment?
Skrine: Yes. I have completed three other novels and I am working on my fifth. No others have been published yet. The first is more closely linked to my medical experience being the story of a woman who couldn’t consummate her marriage. Parallel Journeys is my second, the next a Saga of a medical family, not an autobiography but using some of my childhood memories. The fourth tells the story of an environmental terrorist. The main character in my present book is a fundamentalist vicar who loses his faith.

Who was your favourite character to write?
Skrine: Paul. I am interested in the internal world of men, which they often keep hidden. Although the interaction between the sexes is always absorbing, in general I am more interested in those characteristics that we share as human beings rather than those that separate us.

Did you have to do a lot of research into the area of genetic engineering?
Skrine: I spent three weeks at Schumacher College on a course called Responsible Science: from control to participation. One of the visiting tutors, passionately opposed to genetic modification of any kind, provided useful exposure to one side of the argument. She explained some of the details of the process and introduced me to the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which I used as a catalyst in my plot.