Companies like I.B.M. have offered women scholarships to study engineering for years and women engineers routinely get higher starting salaries than men.

When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is.

I hated science in high school. Technology? Engineering? Math? Why would I ever need this? Little did I realize that music was also about science technology engineering and mathematics all rolled into one.

My grandfather on my mother's side was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology my other grandfather was a lawyer and one time Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

And so when I moved to IBM I moved because I thought I could apply technology. I didn't actually have to do my engineer - I was an electrical engineer but I could apply it. And that was when I changed. And when I got there though I have to say at the time I really never felt there was a constraint about being a woman. I really did not.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

In 1978 I entered Tohoku University into the Department of Electrical Engineering Faculty of Technology.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.