This is a story about a rebellious girl who left home when she was a young teenager,

supported herself as a waitress and a factory worker and a cab driver, and barely managed to finish high school, but eventually became a scientist and ended up winning a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018.

Her name is Dr. Francis Arnold, and what she discovered was a way to harness the power of evolution in a test tube

to make environmentally friendly fuels and pharmaceuticals and pesticides.

You know our whole chemicals industry, our whole lifestyle is predicated on the need to take abundant

starting materials and turn them into our clothing and our packaging and our housing.

Basically everything that supports our life is done through chemistry.

And we do a terrible job at it. Human beings do chemistry very inefficiently and

we've managed to pollute the planet at the same time that we provide these products for us.

And I said, surely we can do better than that

and just look at the biological world,

for examples of how you can take abundant renewable starting

materials, not oil, sunlight, and carbon dioxide, cheap things from the

planet and turn those into the products we need in our daily lives.

And the way nature does that is with these protein catalysts called enzymes. They convert one form of matter into another and into all of life.

And these are the most beautiful, intricate, efficient, selective, non-polluting machines that you can imagine. Why not learn

from the best in four billion years of work that went into the chemistry of the biological world.

So just looking at it from the chemistry point of view, no human being can master that chemistry. No human being can master that chemistry.

No human being can mimic that chemistry.

Only biology can do that.

But biology, Dr Arnold discovered, is open to taking a little direction.

We've got the remarkable story of Dr. Francis Arnold's life and her life's work on this episode of What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance

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