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.

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

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.

Life is nature's way to give mind oportunities it wouldn't otherwise had.

We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.

I think we're doing pretty well. It's clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news.

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