Dr. Frances Arnold
speaker
245 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Dr. Frances Arnold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, thank you so much, Flora.
I'm thrilled to be here.
Poetic?
Well, I think about them as the transformation agents of the whole natural world.
It's enzymes that take carbon dioxide and sunlight and simple starting materials and build trees and human beings and flowers and birds.
They're amazing.
They're the best chemists on the planet.
Well, I think of it that way.
It is a way to explain that we have been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for ages, making strange things like chihuahuas that wouldn't be found naturally and
But for some reason, human beings find them charming or useful.
So why not use that same very powerful process of directing the evolution, which is what breeding is, of enzymes to make what we want?
Well, you're right, Flora.
It's a process of incremental change.
You don't get a whole new enzyme at once, although that may be coming.
But what we do is we start with something that has a little bit of the property that you're interested in.
Let's take your example of stain remover.
If you start with an enzyme that has a little bit of capability to remove stains, but doesn't work in the presence of bleach and doesn't like your
laundry machine, for example, then we can breed in or evolve in those desirable properties one step at a time.
Well, for example, bacteria are wonderful translators of genetic material, of DNA and
into enzymes.
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