Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
Frances Arnold
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.
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.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
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.
Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.
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?
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 we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
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.
Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?
Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.
Silicon-based life on Earth doesn't make sense, but perhaps it would in some totally different environment.
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.
There are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.
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 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 learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.
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 wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.
I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.
There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.
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.
People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?
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?
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.
I am a student of evolution and adaptation.
I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.
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'm an engineer by training.
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
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.
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.
In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.
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 took mechanical drawing, geometry and typing at high school, the latter because that is what they did with smart girls in those days!
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!
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.
My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.
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.
No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.
Only by ignorance is science threatened.
All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.
So many things in my life have gone awry.
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.
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.
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.
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 think of what I do as copying nature's design process.
