Joseph DeRisi

When I came to University of California, San Francisco to work on infectious disease, I looked around to different options, and malaria was particularly interesting and fascinating to me. It's amazing that after 100 years of study of this little parasite, we've not been able to effectively control it.

Surveying the way viruses have been discovered in the past, I came to the conclusion that I could use my technology that I developed as a graduate student - DNA microarray technology - to create a chip that would simultaneously screen for all viruses ever discovered, and furthermore have the built-in capability of discovering new viruses.

In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.

My first job in TV was hosting this young teen magazine show, and all these high school teenagers showed up from all over Sacramento, California, and they chose four of us to host the show, two boys and two girls. And of the two girls, I was kind of the perky smart one and the other girl was the pretty one.

Bring market forces to bear on health care insurers. Creating a health care 'exchange,' one of the better ideas included in House Bill 3200, creates affordable, accessible and portable insurance for millions of Americans.