Stephen Fried has just won a $1 million dollar grant from the Human Frontiers in Science Program (HFSP) to investigate the very question of how amino acids make life possible and ask ‘what if other amino acids were used instead?’. In this project, Fried and colleagues will try to go back in time and recreate scenarios by which proteins could be created from the early 10 amino acids. The Fried lab will be in charge of the first step of generating tools that will specifically engineer biomolecules to be able to switch to amino acids. Congrats professor Fried!