Science and technology are going to be the basis for many of the solutions to social problems.
To survive and even thrive in a changing world, nature offers another great lesson: the survivors are those who at the least adapt to change, or even better learn to benefit from change and grow intellectually and personally. That means careful listening and constant learning.
Give up the thought that you have control. You don't. The best you can do is adapt, anticipate, be flexible, sense the environment and respond.
The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.
What I want to do is encourage women to take on this incredibly exciting and fun challenge to use their brains for the benefit of humanity but through science and technology.
Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?
I get called lots of things - a biochemist, a molecular biologist, a chemical engineer - and I guess I am all of those. I identify most as human!
What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
We've been modifying the biological world at the level of DNA for thousands of years. Somehow there is this new fear of what we already have been doing and that fear has limited our ability to provide real solutions.
Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.
I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.
I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.
Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.
Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.
I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.
My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.
The DNA-encoded catalytic machinery of the cell can rapidly learn to promote new chemical reactions when we provide new reagents and the appropriate incentive in the form of artificial selection.
No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.
Only by ignorance is science threatened.
What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.
