My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.
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I meet so many young people who want to plan out their lives and want a recipe. They want me to tell them how to succeed. I didn't follow a recipe. I followed my instincts.
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Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.
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I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.
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Isobutanol is not a natural product, but we evolved an enzyme that makes it possible to convert plant sugars to this precursor to jet fuel.
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Nature is solving all sorts of problems that we throw at her - how to degrade plastic bottles, how to degrade pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics. She creates new enzymes in response to that all the time, in real time.
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What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.
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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.
