Letting nature do the work

It's called self-assembly, and essentially it's the study of how tiny structures assemble themselves, such as happens in living organisms. At present, researchers who study self-assembly are working with nonliving or static devices. Professor George Whitesides' team, for instance, oversaw the autonomous coming together of 1,500 tiny cubes of silicon on a surface smaller than 1 square inch in less than three minutes. In the same building at Harvard, Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry, uses similar techniques to put together devices measured in millionths of an inch, which may find application in tomorrow's computers and as detectors of disease or bioterrorist toxins. These static devices, however, have already begun to evolve into structures that closely mimic living things, including proteins, DNA, viruses, and even a somewhat humanlike brain.