Paul Rothemund: The astonishing promise of DNA...

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About this talk/nIn 2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of his specialty, DNA folding. Now he lays out in clear, abundant detail the immense promise of this field -- to create tiny machines that assemble themselves./nPaul Rothemund won a MacArthur grant this year for a fairly mystifying study area: "folding DNA." It brings up the question: Why fold DNA? The answer is -- because the power to manipulate DNA in this way could change the way we make things at a very basic level./nRothemund's work combines the study of self-assembly (watch the TEDTalks from Neil Gershenfeld and Saul Griffith for more on this) with the research being done in DNA nanotechnology -- and points the way toward self-assembling devices at microscale, making computer memory, for instance, smaller, faster and maybe even cheaper. ref: www.ted.com