A biography for Frances Arnoldhasn’t been written yet.
“I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.”
“Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.”
“I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.”
“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.”
“Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.”
“Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.”
“I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.”
“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.”
“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 don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. There's always somebody who's a lot worse off than you.”
“In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.”
“The real frontier is making these hybrid systems where you expand the capabilities of biology with chemistry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.”
“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.”
“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.”