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.

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.

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.

Proteins aren't designed, they're evolved.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

I thought to myself: What are the most important problems that society faces that I could contribute to? And it was clear that finding new sustainable sources of energy was the most important.

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.

I studied mechanical engineering at Princeton and worked on solar energy after graduation.

What we need is a strong education system that allows creativity to grow and encourages students to be interested in science and technology.

Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know.

My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.

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.

I see a future in which nature gives us a helping hand. Instead of destroying the natural world, why can't we use it to solve the kinds of problems that we are facing?

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

You never know what will happen tomorrow.

I'm an engineer by training.

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!

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

I was the first female cab driver in the city of Pittsburgh.

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.

I was employed at the Solar Energy Research Institute in the late '70s when Carter was president, and as a country, we had a goal of renewable energy development.

No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.

All my projects are about sustainability, bioremediation, making things in a cleaner fashion.

I can't imagine not being able to read and write, or make these connections from literature and philosophy that have helped inform my understanding of evolution.

Someone asked me 'What's the funniest thing or what's the best thing that you've ever done?' It's always what I'm doing now.

So many things in my life have gone awry.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

Instead of studying what biology has already made, we have to imagine what biology could make. You can say, 'Oh, I want a cure for cancer,' but that doesn't tell you what evolutionary pathway will take you from here to there. What are the intermediate steps?

I did all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally find on an engineer's docket, but it made an educated person out of me.

We've been tinkering with nature for tens of thousands of years - look at a poodle! So we've created all sorts of organisms and biological things that wouldn't be here were it not for us.

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

I realized that the way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed failure.

I was lucky to be passionate about a field that was full of opportunity.

I feel a responsibility to encourage everyone to excel in science.

I don't sit around feeling sorry for myself. There's always somebody who's a lot worse off than you.

I wanted to develop a career where I could use my engineering background to have a positive effect on society.

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

In the lab, we're discovering that nature can do chemistry we never dreamed was possible.

I get these students who come in and say, I want to help people. I say, people get plenty of help. Why don't you help the planet?

There are lot of brilliant women in chemistry, a little later than some of the men, but they are amazing.

We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.

I've been called pushy and aggressive and all the negative words that are rarely applied to men with the same traits. But it doesn't bother me.

I'm not a gentleman and I'm not a scientist.

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

In academics, it's getting your voice out that's important. It's getting somebody to listen to you. I had no problem with that. People were always curious about what I had to say.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.