Quotes from Walter Isaacson

Another time, he was playing [chess] with his equal, the Duchess of Bourbon, who made a move that inadvertently exposed her king. Ignoring the rules of the game, he promptly captured it. Ah, said the duchess, we do not take Kings so. Replied Franklin in a famous quip: We do in America.

There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on. If

It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. "He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn't see.

Bell Labs showed how sustained innovation could occur when people with a variety of talents were brought together

He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace," Vasari said of him. "He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.

The skeptical Silberstein came up to Eddington and said that people believed that only three scientists in the world understood general relativity. He had been told that Eddington was one of them. The shy Quaker said nothing. "Don't be so modest, Eddington!" said Silberstein. Replied Eddington, "On the contrary. I'm just wondering who the third might be."30

It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.

Only the paranoid survive.

Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men.

Like many aspects of the digital age, this idea that innovation resides where art and science connect is not new. Leonardo da Vinci was the exemplar of the creativity that flourishes when the humanities and sciences interact.

So I asked him to go on the night shift. It was a way

Much of the attention paid to CRISPR these days involves its potential to make inheritable (germline) edits in humans that will be passed along to all the cells of all of our future descendants and have the potential to alter our species. These edits are done in reproductive cells or early-stage embryos. This is what occurred with the CRISPR baby twins in China in 2018, and it is the controversial topic that I will discuss later in this book.

My parents were very open with me about that," he recalled.

Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought," Wiener wrote. "This is not the case."14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.

We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

Despite the pecuniary spirit of Poor Richard's sayings and the penny-saving reputation they later earned Franklin, he did not have the soul of an acquisitive capitalist. "I would rather have it said," he wrote his mother, 'He lived usefully,' than, 'He died rich.' 

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

Jobs barked at him.

Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity." J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, "The Computer as a Communication Device," Science and Technology , Apr. 1968.

Critical comments by students should be taken in a friendly spirit," he said. "Accumulation of material should not stifle the student's independence." A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.

Besides, I believe that older people who have scarcely anything to lose ought to be willing to speak out in behalf of those who are young and are subject to much greater restraint.

The fifteenth century of Leonardo and Columbus and Gutenberg was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own. That is why we have much to learn from Leonardo. His ability to combine art, science, technology, the humanities, and imagination remains an enduring recipe for creativity. So, too, was his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.

through most of the night. Even thus isolated, he became known for his brashness. On those occasions

Human ingenuity," wrote Leonardo da Vinci, whose Vitruvian Man became the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science, "will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does.