© PAUL SIMCOCKShawn Douglas traces the origins of his current work fashioning nanoscale DNA robots to his boyhood backyard workshop. From age five on, he spent countless hours with his father building model cars, planes, and rockets. “My dad is the most patient and noncritical person I’ve ever met,” Douglas says. “He never grabbed anything and did it for me. Without that I don’t think I would be here.”
Despite the ability he cultivated, Douglas’s desire to study at Yale University surprised his parents, who didn’t think they could afford it until they discovered need-based financial aid. After studying literature at Yale, Douglas eventually opted for computer science, but then realized he didn’t want a tech job. “I don’t like working on things that are going to happen anyway without me,” he says. “I had a gut feeling I could take programming skills into an area that was not mature and make more impact.”
This thinking steered Douglas to a biophysics PhD at Harvard Medical School, working with William Shih and George Church. In mid-2005, shortly after Douglas started working with the synthetic biologists, Shih heard Caltech’s Paul Rothemund talk about creating self-assembling DNA ...
