We're in a period of uncertainty about [Donald Trump] administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.

My wife thinks she's better than me at puzzles. I haven't given in on that one yet.

Paper is no longer a big part of my day. I get 90% of my news online, and when I go to a meeting and want to jot things down, I bring my Tablet PC. It's fully synchronized with my office machine so I have all the files I need.

You need to understand things in order to invent beyond them.

Teaching is the human thing, in terms of building the kids' self-confidence, so if we take the broad ways that we want to see society to be better, science can only provide certain pieces of that.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

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.