I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
Agriculture as we know it needs to disappear. We can design better and healthier proteins than we get from nature.
Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.
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.
I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.
I wanted to make enzymes that would solve human problems, not just problems for a cell that makes them.
