PASADENA, Calif.
A multi-gifted Frances Arnold spent much of the first half of her life in Pittsburgh and elsewhere maddening her parents, frustrating her teachers and searching for the right scientific field to suit her unconventional nature.
The 1974 Allderdice High School graduate found her place in sunny Southern California over the past three decades, pioneering a bioengineering field and winning multiple prestigious awards that culminated Oct. 3 with a middle-of-the-night call from the Nobel Prize committee.
Among different locations and vocations, there’s a common thread for the first American female to have won a share of the Nobel Prize for chemistry: a fearless, independent streak she’s had since her grade school days in Edgewood.
“I’ve done that my whole life — I’ve taken the way people think and turned it on its head,” Ms. Arnold explained last week in her office at the California Institute of Technology, a small but prestigious university that attracts some students precisely because they want to work under and learn from her.
She may be brilliant and still hard-working at age 62, but this daughter of a Westinghouse Corp. nuclear physicist — whom she greatly admired but rebelled against for his conservative values — is no classic laboratory geek.
In her early teens, she hitchhiked to a Vietnam War protest in Washington, D.C., without permission from her parents. By 17, she left them and her four brothers to move into her own apartment in Squirrel Hill (although still stopping by their home to do laundry).
Living a mere two blocks from Allderdice, she frequently cut classes while working as a cocktail waitress Downtown at night. She drove for Yellow Cab before starting college. She traveled solo multiple times to Europe and South America while a student at Princeton. She’s been an adventurer ever since, including last year’s scuba diving vacation during Caltech’s Christmas break.
At any point at which a standard path might have been followed by a naturally bright and artistically gifted young woman in the 1970s, Frances Arnold could be counted on to diverge.
“You could talk to her for 10 minutes and know she wasn’t like anyone you’d ever met before. … She had her own agenda about what she thought was important and how to go about finding it,” said Stacy Ivers of Los Angeles, who had already graduated from the University of Pittsburgh when she became the high school senior’s housemate in an Alderson Street duplex.
A curious, confident non-conformist is the picture painted by those who have known her, as well as by Ms. Arnold herself.
The walls in her office in suburban Los Angeles hold not just plaques of national and international awards predating the Nobel, which she will accept in Stockholm in December, but framed photos of her with Barack Obama when receiving the National Medal of Technology and Innovation; with the Queen of England, when serving as a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering; and — jointly — with Oprah Winfrey and Sidney Poitier when a guest at the latter’s 90th birthday party.
And she hardly resembles a research scientist out of central casting. A swept-back, short blond coif and youthful features convey a Jessica Lange/Tippi Hedren-style Hollywood look to accompany a poised, direct manner, whether when talking one-on-one with students, tolerating dozens of media interviews in recent weeks or giving any of the guest lectures she’s invited frequently to present around the world.
She was scheduled for one such speaking appearance at UT Southwestern Oct. 3 when awakened in her Dallas hotel room by a 4 a.m. phone call. She assumed it was one of her two adult sons notifying her of a home emergency.
Instead, it was a Nobel Prize representative, informing her she was one of three recipients of this year’s chemistry prize. A whirlwind of interviews, celebrations and appearances in Pasadena followed — disruptive but welcome.
“I’m afraid there won’t be a typical day for a while, if ever again,” Ms. Arnold responded to a Post-Gazette reporter’s request to shadow her on campus on any near-future typical day.
The rebellious early years
The Nobel laureate spent her formative years on Maple Avenue in Edgewood living in a large, comfortable house bounded by woods. Frances, older brother Bill and younger brother Eddy spent time “running around like wild Indians.” They explored creeks, walked for miles, played “war games,” did pretty much what they wanted in those looser 1960s days — so long as they were home for dinner.
They and two much younger brothers, all of whom have left the Pittsburgh area, were the offspring of William and Josephine Arnold. Her father traveled the world as a Westinghouse executive, helping it lead in the early development of nuclear reactor plants. He had also had a hand in development of nuclear weaponry.
Mr. Arnold, who died in 2015, was brilliant, funny and worldly, his only daughter says, and her mother gave up any career interest to be a stay-at-home mom.
And young Frances eventually chafed at them both. In elementary school, her intellect was such that she was being promoted to classes alongside Edgewood high-schoolers. By her own high school years, after the family had moved to Shadyside, she disdained what any teachers — let alone her own parents — had to offer. They knew she was smart, even as she ignored their homework assignments.
“I was so bored in class” at Allderdice, Ms. Arnold recalls. “I was very rebellious by then. … I started just not going to classes.”
There is evidence of that, which she has shared.
Ms. Arnold, who did not maintain friendships with any high school classmates and hasn’t been back to Pittsburgh for many years, nonetheless sent images for use as part of a slide show at her 40th class reunion in 2014. She included the office photos of her with the U.S. president and British queen, then added on, for amusement, the truancy notices that Allderdice principal William Fisher had sent four decades earlier to her home.
Her recollection is she possessed nearly a B average in high school, even without opening books, but says that due to poor attendance there were probably also some D’s and warnings that she might not graduate with her peers.
She was particularly worried one day in the school auditorium. Instead of going to class, young Frances sat there alone, playing its piano. Of course, doing so was “strictly verboten” during the school day, but she’d indulged herself similarly many times. There was no piano in her apartment like the one at home, after all, and she was both talented and interested in music.
In walked Mr. Fisher, the school’s commanding longtime principal. The usually confident student — over-confident at many times, she acknowledges — was taken aback. She paused, her fingers resting on the keys.
“And he said, ‘Keep going. You have my permission to play the piano.’ ” And so she did.
Ms. Arnold pushed the limits still further with her parents, who were well aware of her potential but oft-exasperated by her resistance to their rules or priorities. Their differences had led to the unusual step of her moving out at age 17.
“My parents were so frustrated with me, [and] they didn’t want me to be a bad influence on my brothers. They said, ‘Either you toe the line, or you can’t live here,’ and I said ‘Fine,’ ” and so took up housekeeping a mile or so away, first in Oakland, then Squirrel Hill.
Even by standards of the day’s generation gap, it was an extreme act.
“I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era — You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures,” the professor recalls. “You didn’t share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.”
Teenage Frances was never confirmed in the Catholic church as her father wanted. She never joined the Junior League like her mother sought. Instead, before high school ended, she lied about her age and became a cocktail waitress at two Downtown restaurants that were also notable jazz clubs: the Top Shelf and Walt Harper’s Attic.
Then, she got an even more lucrative gig with Yellow Cab, presumably serving as its youngest female driver in Pittsburgh.
“I thought it would be fun,” she says now — and it was. “I have a map in my head [and] I’m really good with directions. … I made twice as much money as most of the men.”
She would later drive cabs in New Jersey for spending and travel money after acceptance to Princeton. Her Allderdice grades were anything but Princeton material, but she had “near-perfect” standardized test scores and wrote a compelling essay explaining her lack of interest in traditional high school classwork.
And it was at Princeton, while earning a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, that she became a serious student and researcher. She could count the number of other women in her classes on one hand. That only made it sweeter.
“I had to grow up, reach a certain age where I see people do have something to show me,” Ms. Arnold explains. “My father [who had his own Princeton degree but knew better than to try to steer her there himself] became my biggest fan. … The minute I went to college, everything was fine. [My parents] went ‘Phew!’ ”
Her Nobel trajectory
Coming out of Princeton in 1979, in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, Ms. Arnold envisioned a future in research and development of solar energy — almost a direct rebuke of her father’s field. She worked after college at the Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado.
“This was something I could get excited about, using my engineering background to do something good, something the world really needed,” she remembers. “We had a national goal of 20 percent renewable energy by 2000. … Young people were so eager to make it happen.”
But the oil crisis ended, and Americans drove big cars again. The Reagan administration lacked its predecessor’s interest in solar power.
Ms. Arnold’s brother, Eddy, who was on his own academic ascent and would go on to become a distinguished professor of chemistry at Rutgers University, encouraged her to try his field. She attended the University of California-Berkeley and earned a doctorate in chemical engineering in 1985.
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“I was so bored in class [at Allderdice]. I was very rebellious by then. … I started just not going to classes.”
— Frances Arnold
Ms. Arnold accepted a faculty position at Caltech in 1986, one of a sprinkling of women among a couple hundred faculty at the time, and never left. There, she became known for mixing chemistry, biology and engineering among different disciplines in her lab work.
And she set her field of science on its ear, starting in the 1990s, with what’s termed the directed evolution of enzymes. Borrowing from what occurs in natural evolution, she creates proteins that spur chemical reactions useful in development of new pharmaceuticals, renewable fuels and other products.
Ms. Arnold’s emphasis has been on end results that are useful to people and environmentally friendly to society, rather than just something interesting in a research paper. She compares her work in protein evolution to how mankind used breeding to produce dogs like poodles, with different appeal from what might have naturally occurred.
“I do something to make things nature never made but which is useful to humans,” such as by extracting sugar from plants to make fuels.
Her methods have been adapted by others in laboratories around the world, and she continues research in her own lab one floor above her office, directing about 20 post-graduate assistants. Ms. Arnold enjoys her role advising them and other students assigned to her while teaching one course this semester: “Introduction to Biomolecular Engineering.”
Most students she works with address her simply as “Frances,” seemingly both fond of and in awe of her. Her entire lab group lined up outside to greet and applaud her on her return to campus on Nobel announcement day.
“She’s very demanding but also very human and very understanding,” said Kevin Yang, a Ph.D. student in chemical engineering who toted his infant son in a Snugli during a meeting of a biotechnology leadership group Ms. Arnold directs. He and other students noted she was famous to them long before her newest prize or even their first step on the Caltech campus.
The new laureate, unlike most of her faculty peers at Caltech, experienced and similarly juggled Mr. Yang’s dual role as a caregiving young parent and rising academician. She makes no complaint about treatment she received as a woman in science over the years, however. It gave her special attention, she remarks, in advising STEM-oriented females now to be positive and use it to their own advantage.
Ms. Arnold has known adversity, personally if not much professionally. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, leading to successful but intensive chemotherapy treatment that cost her some fragments of childhood memories. Two husbands and one of three sons all died prematurely, in separate instances of disease, suicide and accident.
But her happiest moment on Nobel announcement day was seeing the pride and joy of her two remaining sons, who joined her at an Oct. 3 news conference.
And that’s even though they have been rebels against mom in their own ways. One, in particular, joined the Army and became a Republican supporter of President Donald Trump. She’s proud of him but not for those reasons, even if her father might have been.
“We don’t see eye to eye on politics,” Ms. Arnold said with a chuckle. “I’ve encouraged them to explore, and like me, they’re incredibly stubborn.”
It’s all part of a circle of life and unorthodox, decades-long ride that has given her a wealth of admirers and few regrets, excepting in looking back upon the hardship she caused her parents. (Her mother is alive but frail.)
“It’s called climbing mountains, doing crazy things,” she summarizes of her journey. “People do crazy things, but they also do it because there’s an upside to it.”
Gary Rotstein: grotstein@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1255.
First Published: October 16, 2018, 11:00 a.m.