This is Blue Gene, the fastest computer in the world.

When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson.

A lot of it is due to a book written by an 80 year old man in Boston, Gene Sharp.

Barbara Herz and Gene B. Sperling, What Works in Girls' Education Evidence and Policies from the Developing World, Executive Summary (NY Council on Foreign Relations, 2004), 3 6.

And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment.

I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second, which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does.

Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us.

Why do they do it? It's for things like this Gene from Alabama drives out there with this rocket that he's built with X ray sensors, video cameras, festooned with electronics, and he succeeds getting to 100,000 feet, leaving the atmosphere, seeing a thin blue line of space.

Because each of us contains our entire gene code of where we've been for the past billion years, because we've evolved from that stuff, you can take that tree of life and collapse it back, and in the measure that you learn to reprogram, maybe we'll give birth to something that is very close to the first primordial ooze.