%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| She didn't design better enzymes. She let evolution do it—10,000 times faster than nature. Frances Arnold looked at the fundamental problem facing chemistry in the 1980s and asked a heretical question: What if we're doing this backwards? For decades, chemists had tried to design better enzymes through pure logic. They studied molecular structures, ran calculations, predicted which changes would improve function. It was meticulous, rational, scientific. And it almost never worked. Frances, a young chemical engineer fresh out of Berkeley with her PhD in 1985, had a different idea. What if we stopped trying to outsmart nature and just copied nature's method instead? What if we used evolution? Her colleagues thought she was crazy. This wasn't medieval times. This was the late 1980s—the era of rational drug design, computer modeling, precision engineering. In modern science, you didn't just throw random changes at a problem and hope something worked. That was chaos. That was guesswork. Frances called it evolution. "I was viewed somewhat skeptically by gentleman scientists," she later recalled, "who thought that proteins should be designed rationally." But Frances had a response: "I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist—I'm an engineer." And engineers solve problems that work in the real world, not just on paper. So in the early 1990s, Frances Arnold did something revolutionary. She took an enzyme called subtilisin and started breaking it on purpose. She created random mutations in its genetic code. Thousands of them. She put each mutated gene into bacteria and watched them produce thousands of different enzyme variants—most of them worse than the original, some of them complete failures. This was the part that made her colleagues uncomfortable. She was creating mess. Chaos. Failure after failure after failure. But then came the selection. Frances tested every variant to see which ones worked best in organic solvents—environments where natural enzymes normally failed. She threw away the failures. She kept only the winners. Then she did it again. She mutated the winners, created thousands more variants, tested them ruthlessly, kept only the best. Generation after generation after generation. Natural evolution takes millions of years. Frances was running evolution in weeks. In 1993, she published the first successful directed evolution of an enzyme. The response from the scientific community was... skeptical. Some thought her approach was unscientific. Too random. Too messy. Real scientists designed molecules through careful reasoning, not blind trial and error. Frances kept experimenting. And slowly, the results became impossible to ignore. Her evolved enzymes weren't just marginally better—they were doing things no naturally occurring enzyme could do. They were working in harsh industrial conditions. They were catalyzing reactions that didn't exist in nature. She had hijacked evolution itself and made it work 10,000 times faster in a laboratory flask. By the late 1990s, other labs started adopting her method. By the 2000s, pharmaceutical companies were using directed evolution to design better drugs. Chemical manufacturers were using it to create greener industrial processes. Frances and her team kept pushing further. They evolved enzymes to make bonds that don't occur in biology—bonds between carbon and silicon, carbon and boron. They created enzymes that could transform simple sugars into isobutanol, a fuel that could power cars and airplanes. The implications were staggering. For decades, chemical manufacturing had relied on toxic solvents, extreme temperatures, heavy metals. It was efficient but devastating to the environment. Frances's evolved enzymes could do the same chemistry at room temperature, in water, with no toxic waste. They could replace harsh chemicals in laundry detergents. They could manufacture pharmaceuticals more cleanly. They could produce biofuels from renewable sources. She wasn't just making better enzymes. She was making chemistry sustainable. In 2005, Frances co-founded Gevo, a company using engineered yeast to produce renewable fuels. In 2013, she co-founded Provivi, which uses evolved enzymes to create insect pheromones that disrupt crop pests without pesticides. She held over 60 U.S. patents. Her methods were being used in hundreds of laboratories and companies worldwide. In 2011, she became the first woman to win the Charles Stark Draper Prize—the engineering equivalent of the Nobel Prize. She was elected to all three U.S. National Academies: Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The only woman to achieve this at the time. In 2016, she became the first woman to win the Millennium Technology Prize—the world's largest technology prize, awarded once every two years. And then, on October 3, 2018, Frances Arnold was asleep in a hotel room in Dallas when her phone rang at 4 a.m. She thought it was one of her sons with a problem. Instead, it was Stockholm calling. She had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—the first American woman ever to receive this honor. Only the fifth woman in the prize's 117-year history. Frances was "absolutely floored." She had to reschedule her lecture that day to fly back to California. The world wanted to celebrate the woman who had taught biology to take orders. But here's what made Frances Arnold's achievement so profound: it wasn't just about making better enzymes. It was about changing how we think about solving problems. For centuries, science operated on a simple principle: understand the rules, then design solutions. Chemistry meant knowing molecular structures. Engineering meant precise calculations. Progress meant control. Frances proved that some problems are too complex for pure design. That sometimes the best solution is to set up the right conditions and let evolution find the answer. She called it "humble in the face of nature's superiority." The gentleman scientists who had dismissed her approach eventually came around. One prominent chemist had declared that if her structure for penicillin was right, he'd give up chemistry and grow mushrooms. (He stayed in chemistry and won a Nobel Prize himself decades later.) But Frances's greatest insight went beyond any single molecule. She proved that you don't need to understand everything to create something extraordinary. You need to understand the process. Set up good selection pressure. Test ruthlessly. Keep what works. Repeat. It's how nature created the stunning diversity of life on Earth over billions of years. Frances just compressed it into a laboratory technique that runs in weeks. Today, directed evolution is fundamental to biotechnology. New cancer treatments. Biodegradable plastics. Enzymes that can break down environmental pollutants. Sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based chemicals. Frances Arnold didn't just invent a technique. She gave humanity a new tool for facing the future: the ability to evolve solutions faster than we can design them. In her Nobel lecture, Frances talked about her career-long concern with "the damage we are doing to the planet and each other." She believed science and technology could help mitigate environmental harm, but only if we had "good, economically viable alternatives to harmful habits." That's what directed evolution provides: chemistry that works with biology instead of against it. Solutions that are economically practical and environmentally sustainable. Frances Arnold is now the Linus Pauling Professor at Caltech. She sits on President Biden's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. She serves on Alphabet's board of directors. But she's still running experiments in her lab. Still evolving enzymes. Still pushing the boundaries of what biology can do. Because Frances Arnold learned something fundamental: discovery isn't about having all the answers upfront. It's about trust—in curiosity, in failure, in the unpredictable brilliance of evolution itself. She didn't just evolve enzymes. She evolved the way science imagines possibility. She proved that sometimes the smartest thing you can do is admit you're not smart enough to solve a problem through pure logic—and let evolution solve it instead. Nature spent 3.7 billion years perfecting the art of adaptation. Frances Arnold just gave us the keys. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
