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.

About 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn’t match anything that we’ve ever seen before.

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.

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.

There are commonalities among all the pandemics that occur, and we can learn from them. One commonality is that they all come from animals. And the other commonality is that we wait too long.

If we can contain and monitor animal viruses at an earlier stage - when they're first entering human populations, preferably before they've had a chance to become human-adapted, certainly before they've had a chance to spread - we can head off pandemics altogether.

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.

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.