Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tenzin_Gyatso,_14th_Dalai_Lama) quotes this as
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
I like that. It is a bit careful, but better than everything else I saw from other religions.
I cannot imagine how moving sodium and potassium ions could lead to consciousness if moving electrons cannot.
In addition, I think consciousness is a gradual process. There is no single point in the development of a human where it suddenly gets conscious, and in the same way, there was no conscious child of two non-conscious parents.