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.”

“My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.”

“There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.”

“I love what I do, and I'm grateful for every day I can do it.”

“We all need friends, and friends are there to hold you up when nothing else can.”

“I am a student of evolution and adaptation.”

“Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.”

“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?”

“So many things in my life have gone awry.”

“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.”

“Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.”

“Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.”

“I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.”

“The biological world always seems poised to innovate.”