President [George] Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy.

In order for the United States to do the right things for the long term, it appears to be helpful for us to have the prospect of humiliation. Sputnik helped us fund good science - really good science: the semiconductor came out of it.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg's press did the Middle Ages.

If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies."