50 Fun Facts About Frances Arnold

Frances Arnold won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering which technique?

Directed evolution of enzymes is breeding brought down to the level of molecules, and her made-to-order proteins now help produce fuels and medicines without harsh chemicals.

In 2017 Arnold was named to a Caltech professorship honouring which double Nobel laureate?

Linus Pauling won the Chemistry prize while at Caltech and later the Peace prize, and Arnold took the chair in his name after 17 years as the Dickinson Professor.

In 2019 Arnold joined the board of directors of which company?

Alphabet, the parent of Google, appointed her days after Sundar Pichai succeeded co-founder Larry Page as chief executive, making her the third woman then on its board.

Arnold served as external co-chair of which president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology?

Joe Biden named her co-chair in January 2021, days before he took office, to serve beside geophysicist Maria Zuber and his science adviser, the geneticist Eric Lander.

Arnold's father William Howard Arnold worked at Westinghouse in which field?

Nuclear physics: he took his doctorate at Princeton and then helped design the pressurised water reactors that went into power stations around the world.

Arnold grew up in the suburbs and neighbourhoods of which Pennsylvania city?

Pittsburgh was home from her birth in 1956: she went to school in Edgewood and then Squirrel Hill, and left the family house at 17 to live on her own.

As a high schooler Arnold hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., to protest which war?

The Vietnam War drew her to the capital at 15, though she decided later that she was 'much better at fixing things than protesting'.

Which two jobs did the teenage Arnold hold while living on her own?

Cocktail waitress and cab driver: at 17 she told a jazz club owner she was 22 to get hired, and at 18 she was steering a big Yellow Cab around town.

Before turning to chemical engineering, Arnold took her Princeton degree in which branch of engineering?

Mechanical engineering, formally mechanical and aerospace, had the fewest required courses, which left her free to study economics and foreign languages.

Arnold spent a year off from Princeton working in a factory in which country?

Italy: after her second year she worked in a plant making nuclear reactor parts, and by her own account went all the way to Istanbul and back that summer on a 1956 Moto Guzzi.

After Princeton, Arnold worked at a Colorado energy institute, renamed what in 1991?

National Renewable Energy Laboratory was the name, and the status, that the first President Bush gave the Solar Energy Research Institute, where Arnold had helped write United Nations papers on solar power.

After Princeton, Arnold worked as an engineer in South Korea and which South American country?

Brazil: by her own account she backpacked from Ecuador to São Paulo on about two dollars a day to take up an internship on solar energy projects.

Arnold earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1985 from which university?

UC Berkeley drew her in 1981 with its biofuel research, but that funding died in the Reagan years and she moved into the young field of biotechnology instead.

Why was Arnold made to take undergraduate chemistry courses early in her doctorate?

No prior background in the subject: the future Chemistry laureate admitted she 'knew nothing about chemistry' on arrival, then cleared every undergraduate course in twelve months.

Arnold's doctorate used a column lined with chemical 'bait' to purify proteins, a form of which technique?

Chromatography: in her affinity version the column grabs only the wanted molecule while everything else washes past, just what the infant biotech industry needed.

How long after joining Caltech did Arnold make full professor?

10 years: she came in 1986 as a visiting associate and made full professor in 1996, though colleagues had sniffed that 'gentlemen don't do random mutagenesis'.

Directed evolution works through repeated rounds of mutagenesis and what?

Screening for improved function is the selection step: like a breeder choosing which animals to mate, she keeps only the best variants and mutates them again.

In her seminal 1993 work, Arnold evolved a version of which enzyme to work in the solvent DMF?

Subtilisin E normally digests proteins in water, and three generations of random mutation left her with a version that thrived in a solvent which cripples the original.

Roughly how much better in solvent was Arnold's evolved 1993 enzyme than the original?

250 times, near enough: the measured figure was 256, won by ten mutations whose combined benefit nobody could have worked out in advance.

In her 1993 experiment, Arnold tested mutant enzymes on their ability to break down which milk protein?

Casein made a handy test: her enzyme digests it naturally, so whichever mutant still broke it down best in the harsh solvent went on to parent the next generation.

Which technique did Arnold use to pepper an enzyme's gene with random mutations in her 1993 experiment?

Error-prone PCR copies a gene sloppily on purpose, scattering random typos through it, so every round hands evolution a fresh library of mutants to choose from.

Instead of ethanol, Arnold's evolved enzymes turn plant sugars into which four-carbon alcohol?

Isobutanol had a catch: two enzymes on the route needed a helper molecule that sugar-fed bacteria run short of without oxygen, so her team evolved them to use the one the cells make plenty of.

Arnold evolved which drug-metabolising enzyme family to perform reactions unknown in biology?

Cytochrome P450 enzymes normally add oxygen to the drugs we swallow, and her evolved versions insert carbon or nitrogen instead, chemistry that life had never invented.

In 2016 Arnold's lab coaxed a bacterial protein into bonding carbon to which element?

Silicon: no living thing is known to join it to carbon, yet after three rounds of evolution a hot-spring microbe's protein did it 15 times better than chemists' best catalyst.

Enzymes bred by Arnold's method let Merck make Januvia without toxic heavy metals; which condition does the drug treat?

Type 2 diabetes: swapping a rhodium catalyst for an evolved enzyme made Januvia cheaper to produce and, by Arnold's account, cut solvent waste by 60 per cent.

Gevo, co-founded by Arnold in 2005, has turned plant sugars into renewable fuel for what?

Aircraft: Gevo's engineered yeast turns plant sugars into an alcohol that chemistry then upgrades into renewable jet fuel.

Arnold co-founded Provivi in 2013 to offer farmers a greener alternative to what?

Pesticides: instead of killing insects, the company copies the scents they use to find a mate and confuses them with it, so the pests never get to breed.

In 2016 Arnold joined the board of which maker of DNA sequencers?

Illumina put her on its board in January 2016, the first of two big technology companies to give the lab scientist a seat in the boardroom.

Accounts of Arnold's Nobel-winning method often cite which household product as an everyday home for evolved enzymes?

Laundry detergent: stain-digesting enzymes must survive hot water and harsh chemicals, exactly the kind of toughness her method breeds into proteins.

In 2011 Arnold became the first woman to receive which National Academy of Engineering award?

Draper Prize winners share $500,000 and the award has been called engineering's Nobel, so hers came seven years ahead of the real thing.

Arnold is among the few scientists elected to all three US National Academies: Sciences, Engineering and which other?

Medicine, then called the Institute of Medicine, elected her in 2004, so the girl who gave up on becoming a surgeon entered the medical academy as an engineer; Caltech counts her the first woman in all three.

In 2016 Arnold became the first woman to win which Finnish prize?

Millennium Technology Prize organisers said there was 'only one outstanding candidate', and she became the first female winner in the award's 12-year history.

Arnold was the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; who was the first?

Marie Curie won in 1911 for discovering radium and polonium, naming the second for Poland, her partitioned homeland; her daughter Irène became the second woman on the list in 1935.

Arnold shared her Nobel year with George Smith and Gregory Winter, who were honoured for what?

Phage display of antibodies lets viruses that infect bacteria do the evolving, and it produced adalimumab, approved in 2002 for rheumatoid arthritis.

When the Nobel call woke Arnold before dawn in a Dallas hotel, who did she assume was phoning?

One of her sons, she assumed, calling with an emergency; instead it was Stockholm, and she had to put off that day's lecture in Texas and fly home to California.

Arnold played herself alongside fellow Nobel laureates Kip Thorne and George Smoot in a 2019 episode of which sitcom?

The Big Bang Theory had Sheldon and Amy courting the three real laureates as allies in their own campaign for a Nobel, in an episode of its twelfth season.

Arnold was named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by whom?

Pope Francis appointed her in October 2019 to an academy that traces its roots to the one Galileo joined, years before the Church put him on trial.

Arnold's lab helped evolve an MRI sensor for which brain chemical?

Dopamine, the brain's reward chemical: working with an MIT team in 2010, her lab evolved a weakly magnetic protein to latch onto it so that scanners could watch it at work.

Arnold's long-time partner Andrew Lange co-led a balloon-borne experiment over Antarctica in which field?

Astrophysics: his Boomerang telescope mapped the oldest light in the cosmos and showed that the universe is geometrically flat, work that won him the Balzan Prize.

In the mid-2000s, while raising three sons, Arnold was treated for 18 months for which illness?

Breast cancer had reached her lymph nodes by the time it was found, yet she took up yoga and managed to work every day through chemotherapy and radiation.

Profiles of Arnold in 2011 and 2014 both listed which hobby?

Dirt-bike riding sat beside scuba diving, skiing and hiking in both lists, and by her own account she learned to ride an off-road motorcycle in Colorado in her early twenties.

A 2019 Science paper from Arnold's lab was retracted in January 2020 for what reason?

The results were not reproducible, and a lab notebook turned out to lack key raw data; Arnold announced the retraction herself, calling it 'painful to admit, but important to do so'.

In 2025 Arnold won which American Chemical Society honour, named for an oxygen discoverer?

Priestley Medal: the society's top honour recalls the Englishman who isolated oxygen in 1774, and a centenary gathering of chemists in his adopted Pennsylvania town is credited with sparking the society's founding.

In 2022 Arnold was the guest on which BBC Radio 4 programme?

The Life Scientific has physicist Jim Al-Khalili walk leading scientists through their life and work, and Arnold told him that advising the White House is much harder than doing research.

Between her doctorate and Caltech, Arnold did postdoctoral research on biomolecules in which field?

Biophysical chemistry: chemical engineers rarely did postdocs then, but by her own account she turned her job offers into funding to work with Ignacio Tinoco, an authority on the structure of RNA.

As a girl Arnold dreamed of being a heart surgeon like Christiaan Barnard; what put an end to it?

The sight of blood made her queasy, she discovered, after a summer spent reading every medical book in her local library, and the would-be transplant surgeon dropped the plan.

Arnold called her 2003–04 sabbatical 'the best year of my life'; how did she spend it?

Touring the world with family took all five of them from the Australian outback to a camel trek across the Sinai, then on to Namibia and Madagascar.

Arnold joined the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014; what must nominees hold?

A US patent is only the first test: the invention must also be in wide use, and Arnold's enzyme-breeding method now helps make products from biofuels to pharmaceuticals.

Which body elected Arnold a Foreign Member in 2020?

The Royal Society keeps ordinary fellowships for citizens and residents of the Commonwealth and Ireland, so the American joined as one of ten Foreign Members elected in 2020.

Arnold helped Hollywood screenwriters get their science right through which National Academy of Sciences programme?

The Science & Entertainment Exchange links film and television writers with working scientists, and Arnold joined in the hope that realistic screen heroes would draw children towards science.