It is well to look around at whom, and not just what, surrounds us. Population structure will change everything. Our health, wealth, and peace depend on it.

People have just assumed that... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not.

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

It used to be thought that our genes were historically immutable and that it was not possible to imagine a conversation between culture and genetics.