Nadrian C. (Ned) Seeman: Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor of Chemistry, New York UniversityMICHAEL SUMMERS
To hear Ned Seeman tell it, the worst part about doing crystallography is: all that crystallization. “It’s arguably the dumbest experiment in modern science,” says Seeman, who received his doctorate in the subject from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970. “Basically you’re trying to get molecules to line up in a crystalline arrangement. What interactions are you trying to promote? Who knows? If you don’t get crystals, what went wrong? Who knows? I don’t have the patience for it, and I’m not quite enough of a jerk to force my students to do that kind of experiment for me.”
To cut straight to the crystals, Seeman came up with his own method for making molecules get in line. By taking advantage of complementary base pairing, ...
