I think the Arab awakening has changed everything and I think a lot will depend on what people there ask of us, may be nothing, it may be a lot. I think that really depends how they find their voice and what they see as their real interest, and hopefully that would be for more schools and not more tanks.

America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.