This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

I'm an engineer.

Trained as an engineer, I have degrees in mechanical and chemical engineering and some people claim that I practice

chemistry without a license.

Francis Arnold, the Caltech scientist, shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But what I care about is how do we share the planet

with all the other living things and have a planet that's worth living in while we cure disease and make our

quality of life better.

Arnold spoke April 9th at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC D.C. at an event honoring 10 U.S. Nobel and

Cavaly Prize laureates. The evening was sponsored by the Cavaly Foundation

and produced by Scientific American. Arnold's Nobel Prize was for directing the evolution of enzymes

to make them work even better or in entirely new ways.

And it seems to me that this tremendously powerful algorithm of evolution

that create complexity and that

create the materials and create all of the lovely things

in the biological world, we should learn

how to use that algorithm to solve

the biggest problems that we face. How do we house fuel, feed,

clothes 10 billion people? And it's the biological world that can do this because we're learning how to harness

this four billion years worth of work. The problem is no one knows how a sequence of

DNA encodes a function. We can only read it.

No one can compose that, but we have the process of composing it, and that is called evolution.

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