I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.
— Frances Arnold
For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.
I was lucky to be passionate about a field that was full of opportunity.
When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.
Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.
What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.
I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.
I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.
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?
Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?
I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.
We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.
All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.
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.
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.
Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her - how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.
My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.
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.
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.
I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.
Only by ignorance is science threatened.
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 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.
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.
I am a student of evolution and adaptation.
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 decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
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 are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.
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?
I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans.
I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.
I did all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally find on an engineer's docket, but it made an educated person out of me.
There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.
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.
No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.
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.
So many things in my life have gone awry.
In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.
I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.
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.
