Quotes from Frances Arnold

Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.

I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

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.

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.

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.

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

My feeling is that we can genetically encode almost any kind of chemistry. We just have to learn how to do that.

I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.