The seven deadly sins should be updated. We should add an eighth sin: Cowardice.

Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate - to stop breathing.

Medical ethics is a fascinating discipline, as it deals with issues replete with complex philosophical, moral, and ethical considerations that are rarely black or white.

Life is short, and every moment is precious.

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

My laboratory uses evolution to design new enzymes. No one really knows how to design them - they are tremendously complicated. But we are learning how to use evolution to make new ones, just as nature does.

In the universe of possibilities that exist for life, we've shown that it is a very easy possibility for life as we know it to include silicon in organic molecules. And once you can do it somewhere in the universe, it's probably being done.

Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.

Silicon-based life on Earth doesn't make sense, but perhaps it would in some totally different environment.

People are really interested in these fundamental questions: Why is life based on carbon and not silicon?

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.

Inside of a living cell there are thousands of proteins that enable it to make more of itself and make your malaria drug, for instance. We don't understand those. We don't understand how they work together.

The real frontier is making these hybrid systems where you expand the capabilities of biology with chemistry.

What I find most interesting is what nature can do if you only ask.

I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.

Silicon is all around but it's tied up in rocks... with these very strong silicon-oxygen bonds that living systems would have to break in order to use silicon.

This innovation machine that's evolution, we can use it to do all sorts of interesting things.

Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.

Cellulose has physical and chemical properties that make it difficult to access and difficult to break down.

Only engineers would do something like random mutagenesis.

For some reason, there are political forces that somehow feel threatened by honest inquiry. How can you be threatened by wanting to know the facts?

I was used to being the only woman in everything... I didn't even think about it. Men were my role models - there's nothing wrong with that.

I tried lots of things and never stopped learning.