Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Frances Arnold - Page 2

I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.

Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.

In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.

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.

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

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.

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.

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

I wanted to make enzymes that would solve human problems, not just problems for a cell that makes them.

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

Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.

I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. There's always somebody who's a lot worse off than you.

Silicon-based life on Earth doesn't make sense, but perhaps it would in some totally different environment.

Bemoaning your fate is not going to solve the problem.

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.

Cellulose has physical and chemical properties that make it difficult to access and difficult to break down.

I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.

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'm an engineer by training.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

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.

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

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 tried lots of things and never stopped learning.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

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?

The real frontier is making these hybrid systems where you expand the capabilities of biology with chemistry.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

What I find most interesting is what nature can do if you only ask.

I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.

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 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.

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.

Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time.

People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?

We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.

This innovation machine that's evolution, we can use it to do all sorts of interesting things.