It's amazing how much progress there's been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter - they're half of the world's population. They're the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don't see anything that's going to stop that.

If you don't have a nasty obituary you probably didn't matter.

When World War II came along, which was when I was a teenager, we all expected we would have anthrax bombs and this kind of stuff. We thought it would be a biological war. Fortunately it wasn't and, but it's because the danger is still there and by some miracle we escaped all that, so you never can tell what it going to happen, but biology certainly could be even worse than physics and chemistry.

In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.

The average ground temperature of the Earth is impossible to measure since most of the Earth is ocean...So this average ground temperature is a fiction.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

The marketplace judges technologies by their practical effectiveness, by whether they succeed or fail to do the job they are designed to do.