Inside the mind of a \Nobel Laureate
We can offer scientific solutions, good or bad, but if people don't want them and don’t accept the necessary behavioral changes, it's not going to happen.”
You won a Nobel Prize for your pioneering work on the directed evolution of enzymes. Can you help us understand what that is and how it can help society?
Enzymes are the catalysts responsible for all the wonderful chemistry of the biological world. We would like to use them in human applications, but they are not ideal for this. So, in the 1980s, I started to engineer aminoacid sequences for enzymes that would perform in human applications. Back then, no one knew which sequence would be required to encode a desired function – enzymes are complicated. However, evolution can show us how to encode enzymes more effectively.
The simple process of mutation and natural selection that has given rise to the rich diversity of the biological world can be harnessed by chemists. Using newly developed tools in the fields of molecular biology and highthroughput screening, I developed ways to practice “evolution by artificial selection” for enzymes.
In other words, this is a simple optimization strategy for making random mutations at a low level and screening to find the mutations that can be most beneficial to us.
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