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.

There is no way to find the best design except to try out as many designs as possible and discard the failures.

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

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

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

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.