Frances Arnold Quotes

The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these 'omics' that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward.

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

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

If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people.

How we understand our own selves and how we work with our DNA software has implications that will affect everything from vaccine development to new approaches to antibiotics, new sources of food, new sources of chemicals, even potentially new sources of energy.

In the future, I can imagine that we will genetically modify ourselves using the genes that have doubled our life span since we were chimpanzees.

What's different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That's what makes it both powerful and exciting.

Genome design is going to be a key part of the future. That's why we need fast, cheap, accurate DNA synthesis, so you can make a lot of iterations of something and test them.

We have created life.

In chemicals, Synthetic Genomics is one of my real loves.

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

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.

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

By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before.

People have freaked out when I tell them that my dragons are scientifically based... what else can you call a genetically engineered life form?

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

With the advent of genetic engineering the time required for the evolution of new species may literally collapse.

Now that we can read and write the genetic code, put it in digital form and translate it back into synthesized life, it will be possible to speed up biological evolution to the pace of social evolution.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

We're moving from reading the genetic code to writing it.

Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total. That's been changing in the last few years.

Sometime in the future, I am a hundred percent certain scientists will sit down at a computer terminal, design what they want the organism to do, and build it.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.