Flora Lichtman
speaker
5,166 appearances
83 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard yesterday
Flora Lichtman’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 — 83 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 18.
Appearances
In nature, enzymes are the catalysts that make much of biology work.
They jumpstart chemical reactions that either wouldn't happen or would happen super slowly.
They do a lot of basic biological jobs, breaking down food, building other molecules, extracting energy.
But what if we could harness evolution to engineer designer enzymes that do other jobs, specific jobs that benefit us?
Putting that idea into practice changed the game for chemistry and earned Dr. Frances Arnold the Nobel Prize in 2018.
She called it directed evolution.
And this is really big.
Today, thousands of labs use these methods to coax enzymes into doing things no one had ever thought of.
Dr. Frances Arnold is a professor at Caltech, and we'll hear about where she sees this approach going in the future and her own personal evolutions.
the evolution that brought her into science.
Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Arnold.
Okay, in our intro, we described enzymes as catalysts that make biology work.
I know they're near and dear to you.
Do you have a more poetic way of thinking about them?
When we talk about directed evolution, should I be thinking about this like enzyme breeding, but like instead of a chihuahua, you're making, you know, a tiny adorable protein?
I want to get into this a little bit.
I mean, let's say you wanted to create an enzyme that's like a stain remover.
Can you create conditions that make a stain removing enzyme more likely?
Or is it more like trial and error and you find one that gets a little bit better at stain removing and then you breed that one?
How does it work?
Showing 1621–1640 of 5,166 · page 82 of 259
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