Frances Arnold is the fourth U.S. Citizen and the first woman to win the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize from the Technology Academy Finland.
It's for her work on directed evolution, which is a method of creating specific traits in enzymes and it's something that's used in laboratories around the world.
To tell us more, Frances Arnold, a biochemical engineer at Caltech, joined the show to discuss her prestigious prize.
Frances Arnold wins 2016 Millennium Technology Prize.
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Courtesy Caltech
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Interview Highlights
What is directed evolution?
"If you go outside or even look at the skin of your hand you can see the most marvelous products of evolution. All this amazing diversity of the biological world was made by this engineering process of evolution, making genetic diversification and natural selection. These things, when you think about it, they take materials, energy from their environment and turn them into more life. Wouldn't it be marvelous to be able to use some of that to solve human problems? Some of the machines, the enzymes, those catalysts that do all the chemistry if we could use that in human chemistry we would solve a lot of problems."
"...Using evolution as an algorithim...if you use that, so it's a way of doing something, it's a way of doing design. Just like humans have been designing poodles, lab rats, corn, carrier pigeons...we've been doing that for thousands of years, right? By deciding who parents the next generation. But with directed evolution, we could that now at the level of the DNA that encodes even a single protein..."
How does this affect either now or in the future the average person?
"You'd be amazed actually, at how many products you might use in your daily life that come from enzymes and even some of those come from directed evolution. Look at your laundry detergent, enzyme power? Those were all made by directed evolution, because those enzymes need to work in non-natural conditions and take stains off clothes. Mother nature never asked them to do that before, but then it goes into things like manufacturing drugs...we can make biofuels with enzymes, we can make chemicals that we need in our daily lives. It's a huge spectrum of things.
What message do you think your award and you winning sends to young girls?
"I think it's really clear that women can do this, they can do it well and even more important, we can really enjoy a career in science. I have had such a wonderful set of experiences as scientists, working with brilliant young people, solving problems that are important for the world and doing things that basically help people. I do hope that when girls read about the award and certainly read about the kind of research that we can do, that they might choose to use their talents in this direction."
To hear the full interview, click the blue play button above.