ABSTRACT
Paul Rothemund is giving a lecture for a lay audience in Monterey, California, in 2007.1 Rothemund is a computer scientist and bioengineer from Caltech. He’s a tall young man, clean-shaven and bespectacled in a patterned long sleeve shirt, khaki trousers, and running shoes. Impassioned about his subject he speaks rapidly, a bundle of energy, his hands gesticulating as he roams the front of the stage. “There’s an ancient and universal concept that words have power, that spells exist, and that if we could only pronounce the right words, then-whoosh. . . . There are many ways of casting molecular spells using DNA. . . . We think we can actually write programming languages for DNA. What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly so that we can build anything.” How can you make an arbitrary shape or pattern out of DNA? He tells the audience that he decided to write a molecular program to achieve a type of DNA origami where you take a long strand of DNA and cause it to fold into whatever shape or pattern you might want. Pressing the wireless clicker in his hand a new image appears on the screen behind him. It is a geometrical shape. Rothemund says that to get DNA to fold into this particular shape, to make a molecular spell using DNA, “I actually spent about a year in my home, in my underwear, coding. . . .”1 Whatever works.
