This year's Nobel Prize honorees include Canadian Donna Strickland — only the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics — and Frances Arnold, an American who is the fifth woman in history to win the Nobel in chemistry.

Arnold shares the prize for her work changing how chemists produce new enzymes, which has led to new pharmaceuticals and cancer treatments.

Arnold (@francesarnold), a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, tells Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson she was sound asleep when she was announced as the winner.

"That tells you how much I was expecting it," she says. "And of course I was tremendously surprised, terrified and overwhelmed and thrilled, all at the same time."

Arnold is also a breast cancer survivor, and her Nobel win comes after significant personal losses: the death of her first husband to cancer, another partner who died by suicide and the death of her son William, who was killed in an accident in 2016.

"I miss the people that I love and who are gone. I miss my father. I miss my partners. I dearly miss my son," she says. "But on the other hand, everyone has to go through these things. Life is not a piece of cake, and it certainly is not for many of the people I know."

Interview Highlights

On what her work on "harnessing the power of evolution" entails

"If you look at the biological world and all the amazing chemistry biology does, it comes about through this one simple design process called evolution: Everything in the biological world is a product of this 4 billion years of evolutionary work. I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

"People have been using evolution for thousands of years to breed everything from corn to carrier pigeons, lab rats, race horses, hairless cats — why not do it with molecules? We take the DNA that encodes biological molecules that are useful to human beings, and we breed those molecules in the test tube, just like we've been doing for animals and plants."