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In 1967, the world health community launched a global effort to eradicate smallpox. It took a coordinated, worldwide effort, required the commitment of every government, and cost $130 million dollars. By 1977, smallpox had disappeared.

You don't have to vaccinate every man, woman and child in the country if you have a couple of cases of smallpox cropping up.

Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history.

I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it's just such a dramatic success.

Smallpox, which spreads by respiration and kills roughly one in three of those infected, took hundreds of millions of lives during a recorded history dating to Pharaonic Egypt. The last case was in 1978, and the disease was declared eradicated on May 8, 1980.

I hope that some day the practice of producing cowpox in human beings will spread over the world - when that day comes, there will be no more smallpox.

We now have poured in an enormous amount of resources into cancer. The National Cancer Institute Project, you know, runs about $5 billion a year. That's a large amount of money, but let's not be grandiose about the amount of money we're actually spending on a problem that is attacking us at the most fundamental level of the human species.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.

If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.

Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get.