The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India - both of them doing well. 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.

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.

I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.

Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.

The only way to improve the chances for finding winners is to keep all the choices open and try them all.

Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.

We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.