Frances Arnold

Discovery

BBC

Science

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 September 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 bio-tech 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 mid-life and why advising the White House is much harder than doing scientific research.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ever wondered what the world's wealthiest people did to get so ridiculously rich?
0:05.4	Our podcast Good Bad Billionaire takes one billionaire at a time and explains exactly how they made their money.
0:11.9	And then we decide if they are actually good, bad or just plain wealthy.
0:15.5	So if you want to know if Rihanna is as much of a bad guy as she claims,
0:19.2	or what Jeff Bezos really did to become the first person in history to pocket a hundred billion dollars,
0:24.6	listen to Good Bad Billionaire with me, Simon Jack, and me, Zingsing.
0:28.4	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.0	This is the sound of crowd science.
0:33.4	You shoot a laser beam at this atom.
0:36.1	Is that a big canister of oxygen in the background?
0:38.8	Oh, there's a wasp in there.
0:40.3	Yeah, perhaps possibly the most disgusting thing I heard this morning.
0:44.5	But it's one of the nicest fun facts you're going to hear today.
0:47.3	So here I'm actually holding a donut.
0:49.3	What are you going to do with that?
0:50.2	Find out more at the end of this podcast.
0:53.3	This is Discovery from the BBC World Service.
0:56.4	I'm Jumal Khalili, and in my series The Life Scientific,
1:00.0	I get to talk to some of the extraordinary men and women who are trying to understand our world
1:04.9	and make it a better place.
1:07.4	My guest today is the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry,
1:12.0	an engineer who's as passionate about travel and adventure
	...

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