Last week, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Chris Llewellyn Smith returned to CERN for a seminar in his honour. The CERN visual media service caught up with the ex-Director-General to get his views on the Large Hadron Collider, the SESAME (Synchrotron light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) project and the Higgs-like boson discovered at CERN this year. In the video below, he talks about the value of fundamental research.