Frances H. Arnold: "Design By Evolution: Engineering Biology in the 21st Century"

Efficient and wonderfully creative, biology promises elegant solutions to problems ranging from the production of renewable fuels and chemicals to human disease. To compose the DNA coding for these functions, Dr. Arnold works with the one proven algorithm for biological design: evolution. Directed evolution is a powerful approach, circumventing and underscoring our profound ignorance of how sequence encodes function, to creating useful new biological molecules in the laboratory that biomolecular engineers previously could only dream of. She will describe some exciting applications of this evolutionary approach to engineering the biological worls.

Frances Arnold is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at Caltech.