Quotes from Frances Arnold

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.

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.

Bemoaning your fate is not going to solve the problem.

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

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.

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

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

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 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!

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 decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

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

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

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.

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.