2018年化学奖得主，美国的阿诺德大学本科学的是机械工程，跟生物化学一毛钱关系都没有。她说是她的四个兄弟帮她从机械工程转向蛋白质工程的。

Arnold credited her four brothers for giving her the skills to move from a career in mechanical engineering to protein engineering

见：

2 female scientists make history with Nobel Prize wins

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/female-scientists-make-history-nobel-prize-wins/story?id=58253629

阿诺德大学本科是毕业于普林斯顿大学的机械与航空航天工程专业，集中于太阳能研究的。上研究生的时候转向蛋白质工程的。

但是当别人都利用遗传密码进行蛋白质工程改造，她却另辟蹊径，利用定向进化的方法。

She graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

“She is a terrific person, obviously,” said Earl Dowell, who was one of Arnold’s advisers at Princeton and is now the William Holland Hall Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University. “Much of her work was in what I would think of as biology, so even though her degrees are in engineering she’s obviously used that to catapult into other interesting domains.”

Arnold focused on solar energy research while she was an undergraduate at Princeton, and shifted to biochemistry in graduate school. Many scientists were working on engineering proteins (molecular machines) through their genetic code, but Arnold decided to try a different approach: using evolution.

Her willingness to try a radically different approach was key to her success, said Todd Hyster, an assistant professor of chemistry who did his postdoctoral research in Arnold’s lab at Caltech. “The idea of testing a large number of proteins with random mutations introduced throughout the sequence, selecting the best one and repeating the process, was a formula used in nature, but it had not been applied as a means for protein engineering,” Hyster said. “This approach was anathema to how things were approached at the time. I think Frances was certainly met with a degree of resistance at the time. It is a testament to her to her vision, conviction and perseverance that she was able to ignore these criticisms.”

见：

Princeton engineering alumna Frances Arnold wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/10/03/princeton-engineering-alumna-frances-arnold-wins-nobel-prize-chemistry

相关专题：2018年诺贝尔奖
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