Sculpture is all about deliberation. You painstakingly chip marble from a block, or slowly assemble Lego bricks into a shape, or carefully pile clay upon clay. But we’re now entering a world where people can sculpt with proteins, creating amazingly intricate nano-scale shapes just a few billionths of a metre across. And when it comes to these nano-sculptures, the deliberation lies in selecting your materials in the first place. Once that’s done, you throw them all together and watch them assemble themselves.

Masaru Kanekiyo and Gary Nabel used this approach to create a new breed of flu vaccine that (in animal tests) provides better and broader protection than the ones we currently have. I’ve written more about this over at Nature,