If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you'll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

My broad sense of this is that authors like Smil really paint the clear picture, and once you see that, it's kind of Oh, of course. That's such a primal thing to all these physical services that we take for granted.

Innovation is a good thing. The human condition - put aside bioterrorism and a few footnotes - is improving because of innovation.

Depending on how quickly you get ocean rise, you have people who live in river deltas [at risk]. Bangladesh is largely a river delta, and the rising sea level means that when storms come in, the human sanitation is backing up, the ability to farm, it's destructive-type situations like you saw in New Orleans with Katrina. You're increasing the frequency of that stuff in low-lying areas fairly dramatically.

I feel certain that the personal computer is as revolutionary in terms of the way it will change the way we work, learn, and entertain ourselves as any of these previous advances.