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.
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.
So many things in my life have gone awry.
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.
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 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!
I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.
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.
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.
People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?
Someone asked me 'What's the funniest thing or what's the best thing that you've ever done?' It's always what I'm doing now.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
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?
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?
There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.
Human beings have been manipulating the biological world for thousands of years without understanding how DNA codes function.
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.
I wanted to rewrite the code of life, to make new molecular machines that would solve human problems.
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.
I learned how to navigate the world, and life's potholes, in Pittsburgh.
