Frances Arnold Quotes

Frances Arnold

Profession : Scientist

Birth : July 25, 1956

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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?

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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!

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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?

Frances Arnold

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?

Frances Arnold

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

Frances Arnold

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.

Frances Arnold

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

Frances Arnold