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 life-and the course of science. In Multiplicity, Telmo Pievani explores her journey and the significance-and scientific potential-of Borges’s legendary library and others like it.The famous evolutionist John Maynard Smith, for instance, had fantasized about the existence of a similar enormous library full of proteins rather than books. And in 1995 the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett would devise a library no less confounding: one that collects all possible genomes, or all possible combinations of