Multiplicity: A Scientist's Journey into Evolutionary Space

The awe-inspiring, little-known story of Nobel laureate Frances Arnold’s discovery of directed enzyme evolution—and how it was sparked by reading Jorge Luis Borges.

In 1976, a young engineering student from Princeton, Frances Arnold, happened upon Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” while in Madrid. The tale recounts a vast honeycomb of a library that contains all the answers to the mysteries of humanity. Little did Arnold know that the story would change the course of her...