Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors.

If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG.

It's the knowledge derived from information that gives you a competitive edge.

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.

I don't think I would have spent time learning about the immune system if understanding vaccines weren't something I considered very important.

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.

We're still missing about a dozen vaccines that will make a huge difference. For adults, we've got HIV and TB are still huge; for kids malaria is still killing a half million kids a year out of that 6 million. We probably need some vaccines, but we need a little more data to make sure we're getting the vaccines that will save the most lives.