Angela Belcher Puts Viruses to Work Building Solar Cells

Angela Belcher—MacArthur “genius” award winner and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—originally found inspiration in abalone. She came across one of the creatures’ iridescent shells while earning her Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and became fascinated with how nature creates such a beautiful object without high pressure, heat, or chemicals. The answer: Abalones contain proteins that help them turn the minerals found in seawater into calcium carbonate.

Belcher, 43, thought that if abalones could do it, so could her lab. She’s spent much of her career since then genetically engineering a type of virus known as bacteriophage to build materials similar to how abalones build their shells. “She can solve problems that nature never even tried to solve,” says Frances Arnold, a professor at California Institute of Technology. “Once you bring in the whole periodic table, your imagination goes wild.”