Nadrian Seeman

Education

Seeman studied biochemistry at the University of Chicago and crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh.

Career

He became a faculty member at the State University of New York at Albany, and in 1988 moved to the Department of Chemistry at New York University. He is most noted for his development of the concept of deoxyribonucleic acid nanotechnology beginning in the early 1980s. In fall 1980, while at a campus public, Seeman was inspired by the M. C. Escher woodcut Depth to realize that a three-dimensional lattice could be constructed from deoxyribonucleic acid. He realized that this could be used to orient target molecules, simplifying their crystallographic study by eliminating the difficult process of obtaining pure crystals.

In pursuit of this goal, Seeman"s laboratory published the synthesis of the first three-dimensional nanoscale object, a cube made of deoxyribonucleic acid, in 1991.

The concepts of deoxyribonucleic acid nanotechnology later found further applications in deoxyribonucleic acid computing, deoxyribonucleic acid nanorobotics, and self-assembly of nanoelectronics. Chen, Junghuei; Seeman.

Seeman, Mao, Chengde. Sun, Weiqiong; Shen, Zhiyong & Seeman, PMID 9923675.

—The first deoxyribonucleic acid-based nanomechanical device Seeman.

Mao, Chengde. Seeman, Gu, Hongzhou. Chao, Jie; Xiao, Shou-Junior

Achievements

• This work won the 1995 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. He shared the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience 2010 with Donald Eigler “for their development of unprecedented methods to control matter on the nanoscale.” The goal of demonstrating designed three-dimensional deoxyribonucleic acid crystals was achieved by Seeman in 2009, nearly thirty years after his original elucidation of the idea.