Pittsburgh was a wonderful place to grow up - diverse and complex, one could go from one culture to a completely different one in just a few blocks. It was a whole world in one city.

Nature's made much more dangerous things than I ever will.

I care about this beautiful planet that we all share. This is a home that we have to leave in good shape for the next generations.

I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans.

I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

There's plenty of ordinary Nobel laureates.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

There's nothing like evolution for engineering beautiful organisms.

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

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

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

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

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

Only by ignorance is science threatened.

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.