I do normal kind of contributions, particularly for people who are going over to Africa and help highlighting global health, and that's tended to be pretty bipartisan in nature because of the coalition there exists fortunately around these global health issues. But I don't think my backing, putting a lot of money into political contributions is a way I'm going to try and help improve the world.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three - maize, rice and wheat - and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

Taking a look back, one big reqret is, I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world. The appalling disparities of health and wealth and opportunity that condemned millions of people to the lives of despair. I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas and economics, and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanities greatest advances are not in its discoveries, but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.

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.

While we're all very dependent on technology, it doesn't always work.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you're glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.