Frances Arnold Quotes

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.

We have created life.

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

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

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

We've restored life where life was extinct. It's no longer sufficient to bring the dead back to life. We must create from the beginning, we must build up our own creature, build it up from nothing.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

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

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

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

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

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

What we're talking about is creating new forms of life on the basis of new values.

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.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

Printing novel DNA might open the way to achievements once only conceivable in science fiction: designer bacteria that can produce new chemicals, such as more efficient fuels, or synthetic versions of our cells that make us resistant to the effects of radiation.