DNA molecules provide the architecture for all living things. New York University chemist Ned Seeman thinks they could also be a perfect assembly platform for the smallest computing devices ever built.

How do you build things out of DNA?
We don't. DNA is just a way of organizing materials on a molecular level. It's scaffolding. For instance, carbon nanotubes -- how are you going to organize them into a circuit? DNA gives you a way to arrange them into something useful. Because it has a very precise structure, and because you can control how other molecules associate with it, it's just punching a sequence into a machine. And because DNA self-assembles, if there are things attached to it -- micro metallic particles or carbon nanotubes -- those will self-assemble along with it.