The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.
I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing.
I think there's even a chance that [R&D and innovation budgets] might be increased [during Donald Trump Administration] and we should go and make that case to the executive branch, to the Congress.
We're in a period of uncertainty about [Donald Trump] administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.
There's a true schizophrenia where if you say to voters, you know, do you think the federal government spends too much money and they should spend less, they say yeah, absolutely. Then you name specific things, like Pell grants for students and they say, no, not that. How 'bout NIH, medical research funding? Nah, you really shouldn't cut that. And pretty soon you've proved that what the American public is against is arithmetic.
I am surprised that in various countries, whether it's the U.K. or the U.S., you see isolationist tendencies that would tend to work against the co-operation, whether it's climate change, immigration, innovation, helping the very poorest. Those are things where you want to think across country boundaries and see a win-win-type solution.
I do normal kind of contributions, particularly for people who are going over to Africa and help highlighting global health, and that's tended to be pretty bipartisan in nature because of the coalition there exists fortunately around these global health issues. But I don't think my backing, putting a lot of money into political contributions is a way I'm going to try and help improve the world.
I think (the internet) is contributing to Chinese political engagement..access to the outside world is preventing more censorship.
Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government.
I have not met [Donald] Trump and discussed any issues with him. There have been Republican administrations like the [George] Bush administration who initiated this AIDS generosity. So it's not purely a right-left thing.
