The biological world always seems poised to innovate.
— Frances Arnold
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.
People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?
We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.
What I find most interesting is what nature can do if you only ask.
We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.
The DNA-encoded catalytic machinery of the cell can rapidly learn to promote new chemical reactions when we provide new reagents and the appropriate incentive in the form of artificial selection.
Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.
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.
Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time.
I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.
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.
Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.
Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.
I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.
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.
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.
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.
Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.
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.
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.
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.
This innovation machine that's evolution, we can use it to do all sorts of interesting things.
You never know what will happen tomorrow.
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.
I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.
Isobutanol is not a natural product, but we evolved an enzyme that makes it possible to convert plant sugars to this precursor to jet fuel.
I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.
I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. There's always somebody who's a lot worse off than you.
Bemoaning your fate is not going to solve the problem.
I'm an engineer by training.
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.
The code of life is like a Beethoven symphony. We have not yet learned how to write music like that. But evolution does it very well. I am learning how to use evolution to compose new music.
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.
Silicon-based life on Earth doesn't make sense, but perhaps it would in some totally different environment.
There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.
The real frontier is making these hybrid systems where you expand the capabilities of biology with chemistry.
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.
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
Cellulose has physical and chemical properties that make it difficult to access and difficult to break down.
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 tried lots of things and never stopped learning.
We all need friends, and friends are there to hold you up when nothing else can.
Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.
I love what I do, and I'm grateful for every day I can do it.
I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.
I took mechanical drawing, geometry and typing at high school, the latter because that is what they did with smart girls in those days!
Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.
I wanted to make enzymes that would solve human problems, not just problems for a cell that makes them.
