I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.

It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.

After a lot of debate and a lot of work, what people decided is, it makes a great deal of sense to be open in the system and allow people to begin to build better flu vaccines. I mean, we're still making them in eggs that come out of chickens. And we can see the consequences of that with the current H1N1 lack of vaccines.

When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful." And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.

Try to live without something digital - without digital code for about two hours, very hard to do if you're awake.

When you brought the digital revolution in, all of a sudden, you could build a country like Singapore and take that country, which had the income per capita of Ghana in 1965, and make it something similar to the United States in one generation.

There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.