It’s possible that her unusual background gave her the outside-the-box thinking to discover the new technique.

That's one of the things that I always worry increasing specialization will increasingly forbid.

Arnold's main idea seems rather obvious in hindsight (like many good ideas, I guess): I've often thought that we should care less about how something happens and more about that it happens, i.e. tweak the initial state, leave the middle as a black box, and focus on the result. Even artificial selection, which one can say is one big 'directed evolution', has no need to know what happens underneath it all, and Mendel was doing it without any knowledge of what genes are. I think we humans care too much sometimes about knowing all the details, when we could know less for the time being. I know Aubrey de Grey's background as an engineer has greatly influenced the way he approached biology, and this seems to be at work with Arnold's plan of attack too.

This is a good series you've started: it's interesting, worth knowing about, and it's info the reader can't easily get on the web unless he's willing to do your research himself.