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One Proven Thing That Will Help You Live Longer & How Everyday Things Get Made

Something You Should Know

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How Francis Arnold Invented an Airplane Wing Without Having That Piece of Knowledge

An engineer named Francis Arnold in the late 90s was studying enzymes. Enzymes are molecules that exist in nature, they exist in our body. She wanted them to work in really harsh solvents because that's what you often have to dissolve things in industrially. So she mutated a naturally occurring enzyme 10 different ways and stuck it in paint thinner. Most of them just died but one did okay so she repeated this maybe 10 times until she evolved a protein which would work in paint thinner as well as water. The Nobel Prize winner says we don't know how those evolved enzymes work today.

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