My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy.

All lives have equal value. And so you say, 'why do poor children die when other children don't? Why do some people have enough nutrition or reasonable toilets and other people don't?' So those basic needs that, through innovation, actually it's very affordable to bring them...to everyone.

So not only are we saving lives now, we're creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down.

The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.

To succeed, you also have to know how to make choices and how to think more broadly.

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.

We should all grow our own food and do our own waste processing, we really should.