I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.

I set a rule that people weren't allowed to send good news unless they sent around an equal amount of bad news. We had to get a balanced picture. In fact, I kind of favored just hearing about the accounts we were losing because ... bad news is generally more actionable than good news.

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

Well depending on the government, you either work through the government, which is ideal, because then you're strengthening their capabilities, or you work through the non-governmental organizations. It's never easy, and you know, it's just about the very basics of health. This is not hospitals. This is just primary health care [in Africa], the most simple things, and even so, getting the supplies out, getting the trained workers there.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

50 years from now we won't need as much human labour to do what manual workers do, so we should be able to take that extra productivity and put it to better use.

AIDS we're - most of these diseases - we are down from the peak. We're down about 40 per cent from the peak and if we got the right vaccines, which are at the early stage of discovering, then the numbers would come down very dramatically. So that's why we talk about it as an emergency.