Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.
Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn't mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It's part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least.
Unfortunately the global warming hysteria, as I see it, is driven by politics more than by science.
Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
The PhD system is the real root of the evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don't have PhDs.
I'm a mathematician, basically. What I do is look around for problems where I can find useful applications for mathematics. All I do, really, is the math, and other people have the ideas.
It's not going to be just humans colonizing space, it's going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe.
It's better to get mugged than to live a life of fear.
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.
The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.
Younger people have so many opportunities. I don't see any pessimism among them.
I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It's not so important to get the glory. It's much more important to get something that works. It's a better way to live.
I don't think of myself predicting things. I'm expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it's a question of how badly people want them to.
I am saying that all predictions concerning climate are highly uncertain.
Scepticism is as important for a good journalist as it is for a good scientist.
It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.
The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.