Biographies of me have usually been compiled from old newspaper clips, untruthful publicity stories, and reminiscences of people who claim to have known me well.
I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people. I love theology and some philosophy.
Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.
If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
And the fact of the matter is there were thousands of people that went through those training camps in Afghanistan. We know they are seeking deadlier weapons - chemical, biological and nuclear weapons if they can get it.
What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.
International peace and security depend on certain taboos that are easily recognized when they are broken. It can be more important for an intervention to take place because nuclear or chemical or biological weapons are used as opposed to just measuring how many people are killed.
It's always interesting when you throw two people in a room and have them try to biologically, immediately connect, but that's biology's job.
That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.
Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.
The current approach that psychiatry takes almost ignores social worlds in which mental health problems arise and tries to become highly biomedical like other branches of medicine such as cardiology or oncology. But psychiatry has to be far more embedded in people's personal and social worlds.
The 1st Congressional District contains almost half of the biotech and biomedical companies in Washington, and my job often allows me to meet the people responsible for this exciting research.
The trouble is the field of science, medicine, universities, biotech companies - you name it - have been so splintered, layers, sub-divided, hacked that people can spend their entire career studying one tiny little cog of life.
The biotech game is quickly changing. The people must demand their use of these treatments.
A lot of people said this was impossible. 'You can't build biotech for $50,000. You can't build anything for $50,000.' Well, that's no longer true, and we're proving it.
The way we're really going to grow the economy is to invest in people, to invest in innovation, to have the federal government put money in the kind of research that will create the new high-technology, biotechnology industries that will create the millions of new jobs.
I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.
I think people forget that bipartisanship is really the burden of the victor, not the loser.
People love to talk about the old bipartisanship. But it wasn't really bipartisanship. Yeah, they had a different label. But they're replaced now by people with basically the same views.
