I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.
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.
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 wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.
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.
I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.
