FRANCES ARNOLD

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

Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.

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?

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

In academics, it's getting your voice out that's important. It's getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.

For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.

Give up the thought that you have control. You don't. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.

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

I love what I do, and I'm grateful for every day I can do it.

Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.

Bemoaning your fate is not going to solve the problem.

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.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

We all need friends, and friends are there to hold you up when nothing else can.

I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.

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

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.

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.

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.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

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