The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation and they got infected with malaria, and partly cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved. Eliminate politics, by giving everybody the same message. Keep a flat organization in which all issues are discussed openly. Empower teams to do their own things.

The vision is really about empowering workers giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.

Netscape was able to get the government working on its behalf.

The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It's science that people want to work on.

Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up.

Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not.