The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists who harnessed the power of evolution and accelerated it in the laboratory to produce novel, beneficial enzymes used in pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, industrial chemistry and many other fields.
Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, received half of this year’s prize for being the first to artificially direct the evolution of enzymes; in the process, she became only the fifth woman to receive the chemistry Nobel.
George P. Smith, a professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, and
Gregory P. Winter, a research leader emeritus at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, shared the other half of the prize for developing a technique called phage display, which uses directed evolution to produce pharmaceutically useful enzymes.
