When I came to M.I.T. in 1960, only 4 percent of the students were female. Today, it's about 40 percent of undergraduates. At Lincoln Lab, they had 1,000 men and two women. But we had a very good boss, and he treated us just like everybody else.

Being a woman has helped my career more than it's hindered it.

All the leadership positions that I have had have one common denominator: none has required that I give up my science work.

I think women benefit from being in places and having positions where the quality of work is the criteria, not what you look like. Not every place is like that.

As far as it growing, I believe it is always necessary to evolve. I am not one to rest on my laurels.

I do feel like I've changed a great deal, but not anything outside of the norm of what most people experience as they grow and they take on the responsibilities of parenthood and being more engaged in their business and all that stuff. I think it's a pretty natural evolution.

E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.

I think that life is about growth. You continue to grow and progress, hopefully.