Quotes from Frances Arnold

So many things in my life have gone awry.

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.

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.

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

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

There are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.

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

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

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.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

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?

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.

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.

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

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

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

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

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

What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.

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