2004 MacArthur Fellow "straddles the boundary of organic and inorganic chemistry"

The MacArthur Fellows Program:
Dr. Angela Belcher (MIT) uses viruses to manufacture templates for inorganic structures that may one day be used to construct nanomachines.

"Belcher has demonstrated a proclivity for developing new techniques for manipulating systems that straddle the boundary of organic and inorganic chemistry at the molecular scale.  In her most recent work, she has genetically modified viruses (strains that only attack bacteria and are harmless to humans) to interact with solutions of inorganic semiconductors, yielding self-assembling metal films and wires with diameters in the low tens of nanometers.  The ability to control this self-assembly process may one day lead to the next generation of microelectronics or other nanoscale machines. "