Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I care about this beautiful planet that we all share. This is a home that we have to leave in good shape for the next generations.
Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
I took mechanical drawing, geometry and typing at high school, the latter because that is what they did with smart girls in those days!
Isobutanol is not a natural product, but we evolved an enzyme that makes it possible to convert plant sugars to this precursor to jet fuel.
What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
I was used to being the only woman in everything... I didn't even think about it. Men were my role models - there's nothing wrong with that.
Give up the thought that you have control. You don't. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.
I've been called pushy and aggressive and all the negative words that are rarely applied to men with the same traits. But it doesn't bother me.
In the test tube, I can make any DNA I want, recombining it from monkeys, worms, anywhere. So I can explore new rules of breeding with molecules.
I get called lots of things - a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer - and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!
For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?
We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.
What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.
Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.
Silicon is all around but it's tied up in rocks... with these very strong silicon-oxygen bonds that living systems would have to break in order to use silicon.
I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.
I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.
Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.
I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?
I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.
I meet so many young people who want to plan out their lives and want a recipe. They want me to tell them how to succeed. I didn't follow a recipe. I followed my instincts.
What I want to do is encourage women to take on this incredibly exciting and fun challenge to use their brains for the benefit of humanity but through science and technology.
Most innovative things are not obvious to other people at the time. You have to believe in yourself. If you've got a good idea, follow it even though others tell you it's not.
Doing science at the highest level is hard for anyone. It's hard for women, and it's hard for the men. And we need to have supportive mentors and role models we can look up to.
In academics, it's getting your voice out that's important. It's getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.
Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up - diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.
We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.
The code of life is like a Beethoven symphony. We have not yet learned how to write music like that. But evolution does it very well. I am learning how to use evolution to compose new music.
I thought to myself: What are the most important problems that society faces that I could contribute to? And it was clear that finding new sustainable sources of energy was the most important.
The DNA-encoded catalytic machinery of the cell can rapidly learn to promote new chemical reactions when we provide new reagents and the appropriate incentive in the form of artificial selection.
I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.
Inside of a living cell there are thousands of proteins that enable it to make more of itself and make your malaria drug, for instance. We don't understand those. We don't understand how they work together.
My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.
We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.
Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her - how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.
In the universe of possibilities that exist for life, we've shown that it is a very easy possibility for life as we know it to include silicon in organic molecules. And once you can do it somewhere in the universe, it's probably being done.
Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?
Enzymes catalyze all the reactions of life. They're what allow you to extract materials and energy from your environment and turn that into muscle and tissue and fat. That's all done by enzymes. They're pretty remarkable chemists - they're even better than Caltech chemists.
My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.
For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.
To survive and even thrive in a changing world, nature offers another great lesson: the survivors are those who at the least adapt to change, or even better learn to benefit from change and grow intellectually and personally. That means careful listening and constant learning.