Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Frances Arnold
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist Frances Arnold.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.
My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.
There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
The biological world always seems poised to innovate.
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.
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 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?
I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.
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.
All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.
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.
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!
When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.
I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.
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.
No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.
Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.
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.
I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.
I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.
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 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?
There are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.
I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.
We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.
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.
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
I was lucky to be passionate about a field that was full of opportunity.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
I am a student of evolution and adaptation.
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 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.
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.
I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans.
So many things in my life have gone awry.
Only by ignorance is science threatened.
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.
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.
Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.
Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
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.
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.
I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.
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.
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