Frances Arnold Quotes

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

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

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

Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.

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.

I have always been interested - indeed, waylaid - by the leading edges of technology, even during my Ph.D. years when I pioneered (but did not publish) agarose gel electrophoresis for RNA fractionation. Also, much later, I was instrumental in showing that Green Fluorescent Protein and RNAi could be made to work in mammalian cells.

Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

Once molecules have learnt to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming around the countryside ... Some of the things resembling elephants will be men.

… biologists are now going to be directing evolution.

I have a biology degree, okay?

In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.

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

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

I wanted to make enzymes that would solve human problems, not just problems for a cell that makes them.

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

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

I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.