It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics because discrimination poverty and ignorance restrict growth while investments in education infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase it creating more good jobs and new wealth for all of us.

We can't get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service. And we can't just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.

Research challenges the materialistic understanding of death according to which biological death represents the final end of existence and of all conscious activity.

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European born in Copenhagen Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe met my dad fell in love and then moved back to Rome where I was raised between Rome and Hamburg.

There's a lot of research behind the scenes that you don't get to see but I have an instinct that my dad nurtured from when I was born. I was very lucky then.

I admired Eugene McCarthy's courage and although I left his Senate staff after four years to accept a job as the researcher on the editorial page of the 'Washington Post ' I remained an admirer.

The first legislation that I produced relating to the Internet was a bill to overturn a restriction inside of the law that prohibited the Internet backbone from being used for anything other than research and scientific and educational communication.

I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research living in the forest teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

I get heartfelt thanks from all kinds of people. Today I heard from a waitress in Georgia who has lost her job and is trying to figure out how her local bank can change the terms on her credit card and I heard from a physicist at a major research university who wants to explain a better theory of financial stress tests.