Frances Arnold Quotes

Frances Arnold

Profession : Scientist

Birth : July 25, 1956

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?

Frances Arnold

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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.

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.

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

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.

Frances Arnold

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

Frances Arnold

My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.

Frances Arnold

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

Frances Arnold