Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. Go after the dark matter, in whatever field you choose to explore.
If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet - microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.
We know there are certain types of viruses that are nasty - influenza, for instance, is an area that is not a blindside. But a lot of viruses have come out of nowhere, like H.I.V., or to a certain extent SARS. Because we know we have the potential to be blindsided, we really have to investigate the unknowns.
About 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before.
The world can now maintain an acute infection in a way that is unprecedented in the history of life on our planet.
The features of globalization have huge consequences on pandemics. It just connects us so much more closely... And as a consequence, every one of these viruses that passes from animals to humans has the capacity to infect all of us.
We've put huge resources into predicting tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes. HIV/AIDS is like an earthquake that's lasted 30 years and touched every country on the planet. We have such incredible capacity to think about the future, it's time we used it to predict biological threats. Otherwise we'll be blindsided again and again.
Many people on our planet right now despair; they think we’ve reached a point where we’ve discovered most of the things. I’m going tell you right now: Please don’t despair.
We may have charted all the continents on the planet, and we may have discovered all the mammals, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth.
If you find diseases before they've really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic.
I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.
