ABSTRACT
In mid-summer of 2009, Nadrian Seeman is one of many distinguished speakers at the 33rd Steenbock Symposium held at the University of Wisconsin.1 This four-day gathering is in honor of Har Gobind Khorana, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist from MIT. Seeman is dressed with characteristic informality in an unbuttoned, brown, Eisenhowerstyle jacket over a red shirt open at the neck. He’s an engaging speaker and warms up the crowd by recalling his time as a postdoc at MIT. He tells them that he first knew Gobind when he (Seeman) was “a very, very minor player” at a crystallographic lab at MIT. Seeman left to set up his own lab at the University at Albany-SUNY and, “about four years later Gobind came to the university and I was astounded that he remembered somebody as inconsequential as myself in that era.” The lights now dim and Seeman begins his technical talk. He’s about two-thirds of the way through his lecture titled “DNA: Not Merely the Secret of Life.” He has explained the premise of structural DNA nanotechnology going back to his epiphanic moment at the Albany pub and presented many slides of two-and three-dimensional constructions. Now he is ready to move from the static to the dynamic, from microscopic trellises to machines that move: nanomechanical devices.2 By way of introducing this topic he shows a Rube Goldberg slide (Figure 9.1) on the big screen behind him. Seeman explains to the audience, “This shows a mechanical device that’s not nano. This is an automatic napkin and the way it works is, the guy spoons his soup, he pulls on the string that pulls on the ladle, the cracker goes up, the parrot goes
after the cracker, the birdseed then falls down into the bucket that pulls on the string that opens the lighter that lights the rocket, the rocket takes off, the sickle cuts the string, this goes back and forth and wipes the guy’s mustache. Now this is far more efficient and effective than anything we’ve yet made on the nanometer scale. [Audience laughter] But we’re working.”
