Frances Arnold Quotes

Had I realized while on Earth," he said, "that Hell was such a delightful place, I should have put more faith in the teachings of religion. As it was, I actually doubted its existence. A foolish error, cherie. I am pleased to say that you have converted me completely." "I, too," observed Mr. Hamilton, helping himself to wine, "was something of an unbeliever in my time, and while never quite an atheist, like my arch-enemy Jefferson, I was still inclined to look upon Satan as merely a myth. Imagine my satisfaction to find him ruling a monarchy! You know I spent the greater part of my earthly existence fighting Mr. Jefferson and his absurd democratic ideas and now look at the damn country! Run by morons!

Society may be imagined so uniform that one education shall be suitable for all its members; we have not a society of that kind, nor has any European country.

Asylums had originated in France in the seventeenth century, under the influence of Louis XIV, who, during the 1660s, locked up anyone likely to oppose him in a giant police operation described by Foucault as ‘the Great Confinement’, when over 6,000 people were incarcerated in the Hôpital Général.

Even if we do not suffer from religious mania, unrequited love, loneliness or jealousy, most readers can identify with Burton’s account of information overload over three centuries before the invention of the internet, an extraordinary broadside which is worth quoting in full: I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland &c. daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villanies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. To-day we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news.37 And that way, Burton reminds us, that way madness lies…

When from the fourteenth century onward the valleys were invaded and the people had to negotiate with surrounding rulers, they always emphasised this. To the Princes of Savoy, who had had the longest dealings with them, they could always assert without fear of contradiction the uniformity of their faith, from father to son, through time immemorial, even from the very age of the Apostles. To Francis I of France they said, in 1544: “This Confession is that which we have received from our ancestors, even from hand to hand, according as their predecessors in all time and in every age have taught and delivered.” A few years later, to the Prince of Savoy they said: “Let your Highness consider, that this religion in which we live is not merely our religion of the present day, or a religion discovered for the first time only a few years ago, as our enemies falsely pretend, but it is the religion of our fathers and of our grandfathers, yea, of our forefathers and of our predecessors still more remote. It is the religion of the Saints and of the Martyrs, of the Confessors and of the Apostles.” When they came into contact with the Reformers in the sixteenth century they said: “Our ancestors have often recounted to us that we have existed from the time of the Apostles. In all matters nevertheless we agree with you, and thinking as you think, from the very days of the Apostles themselves, we have ever been consistent respecting the faith.” On the return of the Vaudois to their valleys, their leader, Henri Arnold, in 1689 said: “That their religion is as primitive as their name is venerable is attested even by their adversaries,” and then quotes Reinarius the Inquisitor who, in a report made by him to the Pope on the subject of their faith, admits, “they have existed from time immemorial.” “It would not,” Arnold continues, “be difficult to prove that this poor band of the faithful were in the valleys of Piedmont more than four centuries before the appearance of those extraordinary personages, Luther and Calvin and the subsequent lights of the Reformation. Neither has their Church ever been reformed, whence arises its title of Evangelic.

Well, their piety is more evolved,” said Mrs. Pace. “In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.

Protein engineering has moved from a wary adventure on the part of a few pioneering groups in the 1980s to a routine tool used around the world today on a vast range of targets, and with immense power for fine-tuning the properties of enzymes and other proteins for practical applications. In particular, enzyme catalysis has at last gained widespread acceptance as a tool for chemistry, and, because enzyme catalysis avoids the need for high temperatures and pressures and toxic waste streams, it has become the basis of what is now generally known as ‘green chemistry’. One recent indicator of this remarkable shift in the relationship between enzymology and mainstream chemistry was the share in the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for Professor Frances Arnold at Caltech who has in recent years pioneered major advances in the methodology for efficient development of novel biocatalysts.

A wonderful feature of engineering by evolution," [Frances] Arnold said when accepting the Nobel Prize, "is that solutions come first; an understanding of the solutions may or may not come later."...As our knowledge about the universe expands, an engineer will always be out front, working in the penumbra of understanding. Because advances don't remove uncertainty. They simply move the borderline between certainty and uncertainty.

One of the most painful aspects of the war was that the bereaved were left without a body to bury. Almost half the British dead were posted Missing, leaving their families with the agonized hope that they might one day return – alternating with the bitter knowledge that their remains were lost in the mud of France.

France is the land where dalliance is so passionately understood.