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

And we have almost infinite size of space of all possible enzymes that no one has explored.

Definitely, yes.

So what does evolution do?

Evolution takes what is there in one form or another and makes it better and confers maybe slightly new properties.

So if you know how to look at what is there, let's say in the biological world, or what we could even design, evolution lets you mold that into something new.

something that actually, for example, would make money or would solve a problem.

So the problem for the researcher like me is to understand from what's there what new properties could come about.

And that's called chemical intuition.

No, it's a lot more than a gut feeling.

It's knowing what chemistry might be possible

from the machinery that already exists.

So we know the structures of hundreds of thousands of enzymes now, and we can predict the structures of millions and millions more thanks to these new AI tools.

And if a chemist looks at these structures,

and recognizes some machinery that might look like some chemistry that was invented by human beings, then maybe we can find this ability in those structures that evolved to do something completely different.

And that means we can find novelty by being the breeder, by recognizing what the biological world might be capable of based on our experience.

What's even more exciting is that AI tools for design might even give us access to virtually any chemical transformation that an enzyme could do

And that is so exciting because if we could actually design a starting point for desired chemistry, not have to already find it in the biological world, then we can essentially press a button and genetically encode any chemical transformation.

Wouldn't that be incredible?

But it's not beyond belief.

All the steps towards that are being taken today.

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