Top left: Rothemund’s DNA origami of North and South America rendered as a three-dimensional glass etching.
Top right: Have a nano day!
Below: Lang’s Snack Time depicts the wedding feast of a female praying mantis on her unfortunate male partner. And yes, this was folded from a single uncut square of paper.

From the Lab to the Gallery

Matisse, Picasso—and now, DNA and computational origami. Science, art, technology, and design come together in a new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show, entitled Design and the Elastic Mind, includes work by two Caltech alums—origamist Robert Lang (BS ’82, PhD ’86) and Paul Rothemund (BS ’94), a senior research associate in computation and neural systems and computer science.

Rothemund, one of Caltech’s two 2007 MacArthur “genius” grant winners, invented “DNA origami,” in which he turns strands of DNA into any desired flat shape, from a smiley face to the outline of a contient. He took DNA from a harmless virus and developed a method to fold and pinch strands together. The result is a powerful way to build nanoscale structures out of DNA. The shapes measure about 100 nanometers, or 100 billionths of a meter, across—about one thousandth of a hair’s breadth.

In addition to atomic-force micrograph (AFM) prints of Rothemund’s creations, the exhibit includes representations of the AFM scans etched into glass blocks, using the same techniques used to make laser-etched glass paperweights.
Lang has combined his love of mathematics and paper-folding, becoming one of the pioneers in computational origami—the art and science of designing origami with mathematical techniques. The exhibit showcases some of his intricate creations, as well as the TreeMaker software he wrote to make his increasingly complex designs.

Both types of origami are displayed alongside a myriad of provocative exhibits, including a honeycomb vase, pig bone tissue grown into the shape of wings, and furniture modeled after human bones. The show runs through May 12. —MW