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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · The evolution of an enzyme engineer who changed chemistry · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Otherwise, you put people to sleep.

We're very good at that, as you probably well know.

And I decided early on I didn't want to put people to sleep and that I wanted to share the beauty of the enzyme world and my excitement about evolution.

And honestly, it is truly exciting and wonderful to hear the stories.

Well, I think it'll be science's moment.

As big AI turns its attention to science, we will have incredibly powerful tools to address our lack of understanding of the physical and the biological world.

I think biology is particularly exciting because it's so complex.

And the new tools that are coming up,

will help us navigate this complexity and get better understanding, at least I hope get better understanding, of the complexities of life.

Well, the one that I mentioned at the beginning, which is how do you genetically encode any chemistry?

So half of my research team at Caltech is

expert in AI and machine learning.

I'm not.

I kind of ride along the top.

And we are integrating these experimental methods of evolution in the laboratory with AI tools so that we can explore this universe of possibilities that biology provides.

Well, we do it in the context of individual problems.

So we'll take on a challenge of making, for example, a tuberculosis drug using enzymes so that it can be sold cheaply in developing countries.

That's a really hard enzyme design problem.

And we took money from the Gates Foundation to...

build enzymes that do new-to-nature chemistry to do that.

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