My very warm congratulations to Frances
and let me simply present to you the 2018 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry!
[ applause ]
Thank you, Thank you so much.
All my friends, my students, my colleagues, my co-workers in this fabulous institution, Caltech
Because, I don't know about you, but I feel incredibly lucky and really grateful to be here.
We're celebrating the work of more than two hundred current and former members of my laboratory.
But especially we're celebrating Caltech.
We're celebrating a small and very special institution
that made it possible for me to do the work that led to the Nobel Prize.
What I was able to do here, 30 years ago now.. wow!
I didn't know I'd be a lifer but I guess that's the way it's gonna be. [laughter]
Thirty years ago... I never stayed in one job more than a year until I came here!
...it wouldn't have been possible to do elsewhere. Because I was a naive
– yes, I'm looking at a lot of you – I was a naive young chemical engineer in the late 1980s
and I decided to evolve proteins to do things that nature never cared about,
that were not relevant to biology, but that would be useful to human beings.
It was really an engineering problem.
And evolution: why did I use evolution? Because I had no clue how to design those proteins.
So only here could I convince students from very different disciplines
– engineers, chemists, biochemists, molecular biologists, computational scientists –
to throw their hat into this cooky ring and this completely unexplored field
and really contribute their creativity to this idea that
you could breed proteins like you breed cats and dogs.
And only here would I have been challenged to solve ever harder problems.
So I have to thank my very challenging colleagues in the CCE division who said "well, do something I can't do."
Because, really, that challenge is what pushed me to really push the boundaries of the science.
And early in my career, I found inspiration from the greatest engineer and chemist of all time.
And it's not on the Nobel wall. It's the natural world.
The living world is the greatest chemical engineer.
Because when you think about it, nature has discovered all these amazing solutions
to an incredible array of problems of being alive. What has that given us?
The biological world figured out long before we did, to extract materials and energy from the environment
and convert them into this vast collection of self-repairing, brilliant, adaptive materials, molecular machines, control systems, chemical factories...
We're just in awe of how nature does that.
So inspired by nature, I became an engineer of the biological world to rewrite DNA to solve human problems.
And, as I said, I had no clue how hard that would be.
Here I was – just think about this: this was the beginning of the DNA revolution.
When we were just learning to cut and paste DNA for the first time with our baby scissors.
We had no idea what we were doing.
Just to put it in context, this was just a couple of decades after the structure of DNA was unveiled for the first time.
That naivete worked well for me, because
I wanted to engineer the molecules of life, the proteins to make things that would serve us
in our bid to survive on this planet and to share it with everybody else.
And in particular I wanted to explore where nature had never gone.
I had to convince those students to explore it with me.
But nature does it, right? We don't know how to compose DNA.
It's like a Beethoven symphony, to me, this product of four billion years of evolution.
We didn't know how to compose it, so it's obvious to use the algorithm that nature used to build proteins.
Because you think about how nature makes catalysts, materials, organisms,
with a process that's both elegant and simple.
This Darwinian exploration of trial and error and success and failure – students, it's a good model!
You've got to try and succeed, or not, and just move on.
But it has built a biological world that's beautiful.
And as beautiful as the biological world is, it's this algorithm that really is stunning. It's so simple.
Why not use it to move forward? This process can take us into the future.
I'm really excited about how well evolution can move us, not just from four billion years ago to today,
but it can help us move into a future that's much brighter than it might look to us.
I also think that we, and especially our leaders, have a lot to learn from how nature innovates.
Because the biological world is like the ultimate Internet of living things.
The ultimate in crowdsourcing on problem solving.
A gazillion organisms are working 24/7 to solve problems. And what have we learned?
We know that innovation comes straight out of diversity, right?
Recombining different parts, recombining different genetic material, different experiences:
The diversity of Caltech, the diversity of science, is what makes us innovative.
That's the lesson that I've learned.
Because if we all think alike, and we all move down the same path, that's the surest route to extinction.
Anybody who studies evolution knows that.
That's what evolution teaches: a sure route to extinction is not to make use of diversity.
So I want to thank you. I want to thank the Caltech administration:
David Tirrell, Tom Rosenbaum and all of the administration, Jackie Barton,
Everybody who donates their time and energy to make this place great.
And for these thirty wonderful years of a supportive, highly creative community.
I want to thank the staff, because you make this place great. You make it easy for us to work here.
And I appreciate that immensely.
I thank my colleagues who were always supportive, and those who were not so supportive,
[laughter] because you pushed me to move higher. [laughter]
And for the chance, especially, to be my best
and to bring out the best of those who put their trust in me as students,
and who made this all happen.
Thank you very much.