American biochemical engineer Frances Arnold, whose discoveries in directed evolution are used in drug manufacturing, has been awarded the awarded €1 million Millennium Technology Prize.
Directed evolution mimics natural evolution to generate new and better proteins in the laboratory. It is used in the production of the oral diabetes drug Januvia (sitagliptin) and to convert renewable resources such as sugar cane into biofuels.
Arnold, from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is co-founder of Gevo, a company specialising in green chemistry.
She was chosen from amongst 79 nominees. She is the first woman to win the prize, which aspires to be a technology equivalent of the Nobel Prizes for the sciences.
The Millennium Prize, founded in 2004, is awarded every two years by the Technological Academy of Finland.
Past winners include Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web, Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of bright blue and white LEDs, Nobel Prize-winning stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka, and Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system.
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