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0:00
My name is Nadrian Seeman,
better known as Ned.
And I'm a professor
at New York University
in the chemistry department.
What I'm going to be
discussing today,
is a field that originated
in our laboratory
and has been growing rapidly
in recent years,
ever since the turn of the century,
and it's called
structural DNA nanotechnology.
0:25
What we do,
is we use the information
in DNA molecule
to make shapes and machines
and even crystals.
And we're hoping
that there are going to be
a large number of applications
of this approach in future years.
We do not talk here about the role
of this approach in living systems
but strictly as a chemical approach
to controlling molecular structure
in the finest possible way
in three dimensions.
0:59
So this slide shows
a series of organisms.
Everybody who's watching this
knows that DNA is the genetic
material of all of them,
the plants, the animals,
the people.
And for the rest of the talk,
I want you to forget
that DNA has a genetic role.
1:19
So the slide shown here
is a chandelier in the cemetery
of the Capuchin monastery
in Rome.
So what we have done here
is captured an example of taking
a natural material, namely bones,
and organizing them in a way
that is not the conventional way
to organize them,
not the way
a skeleton usually looks,
but rather form
an unnatural object,
in this case the chandelier,
so that we have
an arrangement of matter
that we've created with the bones,
but the bones themselves are not
what we're going to be discussing,
but rather the way
that we organize them.
