This post is a bit late, but real life has been busy recently. The Kavli Foundation recently announced their 2010 Kavli Prize for Nanoscience, which they awarded to Don Eigler and Nadrian Seeman, for "their development of unprecedented methods to control matter on the nanoscale". As in their previous 2008 award to Louis Brus and Sumio Iijima, this prize is richly deserved by the awardees.
Don Eigler ran the scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) research group at IBM Almaden, where he and co-workers constructed incredibly stable STMs that functioned in ultrahigh vacuum and at low temperatures. With the resulting stability and surface cleanliness, Eigler et al. were able to demonstrate manipulation of matter on the atomic scale, giving us several of the most iconic images in nanoscience. Eigler's intellectual progeny have gone on to many faculty positions and trained generations of practitioners in the art and science of working at the atomic scale.
Nadrian Seeman had the foresight to realize what an incredible toolkit nature has provided for us in the form of DNA. While most people are familiar with double-helix structure of DNA, Seeman and co-workers developed techniques to make nanoscale DNA building blocks that can assemble into complex, three-dimensional structures. This is DNA as a construction tool rather than DNA as a carrier of genetic information. Who knows what the end result will be of this capability - I have been very impressed by some related work.
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