Words matter. These are the best Frances Arnold Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.
Give up the thought that you have control. You don’t. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.
I’ve done that my whole life – I’ve taken the way people think and turned it on its head.
Enzymes catalyze all the reactions of life. They’re what allow you to extract materials and energy from your environment and turn that into muscle and tissue and fat. That’s all done by enzymes. They’re pretty remarkable chemists – they’re even better than Caltech chemists.
In the lab, we’re discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.
I’m not a gentleman and I’m not a scientist.
I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.
I know how to do science. I know how to make things. I don’t know how to run a company. Now that’s a really tough job.
I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.
I don’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. There’s always somebody who’s a lot worse off than you.
I learned how to navigate the world, and life’s potholes, in Pittsburgh.
So many things in my life have gone awry.
Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.
What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.
My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.
I care about this beautiful planet that we all share. This is a home that we have to leave in good shape for the next generations.
I think of what I do as copying nature’s design process.
Nature’s made much more dangerous things than I ever will.
Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.
Someone asked me ‘What’s the funniest thing or what’s the best thing that you’ve ever done?’ It’s always what I’m doing now.
I meet so many young people who want to plan out their lives and want a recipe. They want me to tell them how to succeed. I didn’t follow a recipe. I followed my instincts.
We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.
I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.
Silicon is all around but it’s tied up in rocks… with these very strong silicon-oxygen bonds that living systems would have to break in order to use silicon.
Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up – diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.
I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can’t we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?
There’s nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.
You never know what will happen tomorrow.
This innovation machine that’s evolution, we can use it to do all sorts of interesting things.
I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.
I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans.
I get called lots of things – a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer – and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!
There’s plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.
In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you’ve got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it’s not.
In the universe of possibilities that exist for life, we’ve shown that it is a very easy possibility for life as we know it to include silicon in organic molecules. And once you can do it somewhere in the universe, it’s probably being done.
Silicon-based life on Earth doesn’t make sense, but perhaps it would in some totally different environment.
I tried lots of things and never stopped learning.
I was used to being the only woman in everything… I didn’t even think about it. Men were my role models – there’s nothing wrong with that.
Inside of a living cell there are thousands of proteins that enable it to make more of itself and make your malaria drug, for instance. We don’t understand those. We don’t understand how they work together.
My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn’t done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.
We’re seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can’t make efficiently but biology does.
For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?
I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era – You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn’t share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.
My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them – they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.
I thought to myself: What are the most important problems that society faces that I could contribute to? And it was clear that finding new sustainable sources of energy was the most important.
Cellulose has physical and chemical properties that make it difficult to access and difficult to break down.
In academics, it’s getting your voice out that’s important. It’s getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.
I love what I do, and I’m grateful for every day I can do it.
Bemoaning your fate is not going to solve the problem.
I’d like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.
We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.
I get these students who come in and say, I want to help people. I say, people get plenty of help. Why don’t you help the planet?
What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.
Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, ‘Oh, I want a cure for cancer,’ but that doesn’t tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?
I took mechanical drawing, geometry and typing at high school, the latter because that is what they did with smart girls in those days!
I’m an engineer by training.
To survive and even thrive in a changing world, nature offers another great lesson: the survivors are those who at the least adapt to change, or even better learn to benefit from change and grow intellectually and personally. That means careful listening and constant learning.
We all need friends, and friends are there to hold you up when nothing else can.
I’ve been called pushy and aggressive and all the negative words that are rarely applied to men with the same traits. But it doesn’t bother me.
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
Doing science at the highest level is hard for anyone. It’s hard for women, and it’s hard for the men. And we need to have supportive mentors and role models we can look up to.
What I want to do is encourage women to take on this incredibly exciting and fun challenge to use their brains for the benefit of humanity but through science and technology.