Frances Arnold

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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

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. ”

Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will. ”

I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans. ”

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins? ”

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

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