In 1959, physicist, bongo player and lothario Richard Feynman asked why scientists couldn’t engrave the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin.

Professor Uri Sivan’s response: Kid stuff.

The chief of nanotechnology at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology has progressed way beyond pinheads, instead crafting a transistor utilizing gold, bacterial DNA and a wire one-thousandth the width of the hair in your comb.

(The term “nano,” incidentally, means “one-billionth,” and is often placed in front of the words “meter” or “second.”)

It isn’t that he’s created the world’s smallest transistor, admitted Sivan, in town this week for an international scientific conference in San Francisco. Others have built smaller. But Sivan and his team have created the world’s first transistor that, in essence, built itself.

“The devices we have built are made out of electronic materials, semiconductors, metals and so on. But they were assembled in a completely autonomous way by DNA molecules,” said Sivan, a middle-aged man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard and a mischievous grin he flashes frequently.

“You take the DNA molecules which contain all the information needed for assembly of these devices. And, of course, this is an oversimplification, but you take a test tube, put in all the electronic materials, all your biomolecules and, so to speak, shake it and the biomolecules basically take the electronic materials and hook them together to form a circuit. Out of the test tube comes a fully functional transistor assembly completely based on the information of DNA molecules and certain proteins.”

The professor didn’t craft a transistor small enough to fit comfortably into a drop of water for the same reason Sir Edmund Hillary climbed mountains. The scientific — and economic — possibilities are as grandiose as his work is miniscule.

In harnessing DNA molecules’ inherent recombinant properties, Sivan has taken a huge first step toward what he calls “the Holy Grail of nanotechnology” — being able to construct larger objects, from the bottom-up.

And, if you can build an object starting at the molecular level, you can control the properties of that object. What are the ramifications of that? A better question might be what aren’t the ramifications of that?

Sivan taps the desk in front of him.

“The properties of matter are determined on the molecular scale. If you ask yourself what gives this desk its properties, for example: What gives it its hardness? Why doesn’t it conduct electricity?” he said.

“If we gain control over matter on that scale, we will be able to tailor the properties of materials on much larger scales.”

Sivan flashes his grin and points at this reporter’s sweater.

“Your shirt, for instance. In San Francisco, the weather is more or less constant over the year. [Elsewhere] you have to change shirts in the summer and winter. At some point, fabric will adapt itself based on the weather conditions.”

And, since Sivan’s transistor can identify very minute quantities of DNA molecules floating in solution, it has already been applied to build a portable kit that detects anthrax.

But the most readily applicable use of Sivan’s work is cheaper and smaller electronics. Much of the push for miniaturization is driven by the bottom line; Sivan notes that the cost of assembling a computing unit is thousands of times cheaper than it was in the 1970s because the components are smaller and can be mass-produced.

After all, “If you are carving something one nanometer per side, you are not going to do it one at a time,” said Sivan.

The practical applications in the field of electronics could make Sivan and Technion a ton of money — and nanotechnology is a remarkably expensive game to play — but that doesn’t seem to drive him much. He’s much more interested in the mind-blowing possibilities that lie far, far down the line.

“We are open to vast and fantastic possibilities. And we have a very long way to go,” said Sivan, whose department has benefited from aggressive American Society for Technion funding.

“But what a journey!”