Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies each flourishing in its own right coming together in powerful new ways.

I'm the one who made many of the bold comments that we'd seen the technologies from AMD as pretty good. Their technology in many areas was leading. But those are transient.

Now a lot of what we are doing right now quite frankly is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning for example the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).

People are naming it the Third Wave the Information Age etc. but I would say those are basically technological descriptions and this next shift is not about technology - although obviously it will be influenced and in some cases expressed by technologies.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies especially in recombinant DNA technology allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

A company can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on firewalls intrusion detection systems and encryption and other security technologies but if an attacker can call one trusted person within the company and that person complies and if the attacker gets in then all that money spent on technology is essentially wasted.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages zeppelins armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Novel technologies and ideas that impinge on human biology and their perceived impact on human values have renewed strains in the relationship between science and society.

With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed.