Frances Arnold: From taxi driver to Nobel Prize
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nobel Prize-winning chemist Frances Arnold left home at 15 and went to school ‘only when she felt like it’. She disagreed with her parents about the Vietnam War and drove big yellow taxis in Pittsburgh to pay the rent.
Decades later, after several changes of direction (from aerospace engineer to biotech pioneer), she invented a radical new approach to engineering enzymes. Rather than try to design industrial enzymes from scratch (which she considered to be an impossible task), Frances decided to let Nature do the work. ‘I breed enzymes like other people breed cats and dogs’ she says.
While some colleagues accused her of intellectual laziness, industry jumped on her ideas and used them in the manufacture of everything from laundry detergents to pharmaceuticals.
She talks to Jim Al-Khalili about her journey from taxi driver to Nobel Prize, personal tragedy in midlife and why advising the White House is much harder than doing scientific research.
Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:36.0 | Hello, welcome to the Life Scientific, the podcast that gets inside the lives and minds |
| 0:41.2 | of leading scientists to find out what makes them tick. |
| 0:44.9 | I'm Jemma Khaliliya. |
| 0:45.9 | Today I'm talking to a woman with an incredible story to tell, from taxi driver to Nobel |
| 0:51.0 | Prize. |
| 0:52.2 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:57.0 | My guest today is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, an engineer who's |
| 1:02.5 | as passionate about travel and adventure as she is about doing scientific research and |
| 1:07.5 | who spent her teenage years driving yellow taxis around the streets of Pittsburgh. |
| 1:12.5 | Francis Arnold invented a way of manufacturing chemical substances that is cleaner and |
| 1:17.9 | greener than the industrial processes that take place on most chemical plants. |
| 1:22.2 | Instead of synthesising the chemicals we need from scratch, she lets nature do the work, |
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