I believe that with great wealth comes great responsibility, a responsibility to give back to society and a responsibility to see that those resources are put to work in the best possible way to help those most in need.
Married life is a simpler life. Who I spend my time with is established in advance.
Solutions to all biological problems are greatly advanced by the sequencing work and the new tools that are created.
If success corrupts, I’m probably pretty corrupted by now.
Test scores aren’t perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.
The impact of improving health is that the population growth goes down, and so you can educate more kids, feed more kids.
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young. I get very concerned when people talk about cutting education budgets.
The pace of progress in biology creates a foundation that naturally gets picked up by the biotech and pharmaceutical industry to solve rich-world diseases. This is attractive science. It’s science that people want to work on.
There is no doubt PC prices will be coming down.
My guideline has always been to avoid a focus on me personally. Not because of any deep, dark secrets. Rather just a sense of privacy.
Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That’s 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors.
By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges.
It is hard to sell Congress and the American people on foreign aid. Is it harder to do that than it is to sell billionaires on the idea that they should give all their money away.
If you withdraw the incredible focus on polio, it will spread back, and in poor countries you’ll get something like 100,000 cases a year. So by being very intense and getting the cases down to zero, what you do is you avoid all the future cases.
Vaccination is pretty special because you can do a vaccination campaign anywhere in the world. All you are doing is gathering women from the villages, getting them the vaccines and asking them to go around and find the children.
When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.
We believe unbelievable progress can be made, in both inventing new vaccines and making sure they get out to all the children who need them.
My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A’s. I decided to get straight A’s. I didn’t want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A’s once, its easier.
If you want to build a great company, get the hell out of Silicon Valley.
Ridiculous sums of money can be confusing.