Personal & Professional
BACKGROUND
Frances H. Arnold
Meet Frances Arnold, the innovator behind direct evolution in bioengineering. Directed evolution is used in enzyme creation (which are used to speed up chemical reactions). An advantage of this process is that mutations do not have to be completely random, the mutations can be unplanned enough to allow for important discoveries but not so random as to be inefficient. Arnold’s discoveries improved the creation of pharmaceuticals, plastics and other chemicals, and led her to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018.
“Science, like all human endeavors, is evolutionary. We build by adding to and recombining what is already there.”
