It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

I enjoyed mathematics from a very young age. At the beginning of college, I had this illusion, which was kind of silly in retrospect, that if I just understood math and physics and philosophy, I could figure out everything else from first principles.

There was a period in my life when I was eating ramen non-stop. These days, less so. Once you have a kid, you end up eating a lot of foods with broccoli in them.

The best types of problems are those that seem harder at first than when you think about it.

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.