Obituary: Ned Seeman – Nanotechnologist who built the first self-assembling DNA structures
Nadrian Seeman is widely credited with being the first person to recognize that DNA can be used to design and build programmable nanostructures and nanomachines. With this new way of thinking about self-assembly, he helped to turn chemistry into an information science. He has died aged 75.
Although by his own admission not a diligent student, he stayed at Chicago to take a doctorate in biochemistry, before switching to crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. As a postdoctoral researcher, he worked with pioneer of DNA chemistry Alexander Rich at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He then joined the biology department of the State University of New York at Albany in 1977. He was disparaging about his time there.