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

They can read DNA and spit out the enzymes wonderfully.

So we use that capability, like a bag of reagents, basically, of bacteria to make all the mutant enzymes that we'll program in.

And then we search through those bacteria to find the ones that harbor the great stain-removing enzymes.

Well, I don't do that.

In fact, I'll tell you a funny story.

Way long ago, back in the early 1990s, I had a grant from Procter & Gamble who wanted me to make an enzyme for all-temperature cheer.

their laundry detergent.

And it's supposed to work at all.

But it's a wonderful example because I didn't have any way to test whether it would take stains off of clothes.

So I said, sure, I'll breed you an enzyme that works at all temperatures, but I'll bet it'll forget how to take stains off of clothes.

Because if you breed one property, you can very well lose other things that you're interested in.

So you need to be able to measure

all of the properties that you're interested in.

It's called the first law of directed evolution, which is you get what you screen for.

And that may sound like a silly statement, but it's actually a very profound statement because if you don't screen or search for the thing that you really care about, you'll get what you searched for, but it may not be what you want.

We have these great t-shirts in my lab that says you can't always get what you want when we're searching the non-biological world.

So, yes, because that's exactly what evolution does.

But if you expand...

the space of biology, and you go out into new chemical frontiers, what happens is that those new molecules pick up properties that may be interesting for something else.

And that's how innovation happens in biology, how something wholly new is created.

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