The field of nanotechnology has great potential to change the world. There has been a tremendous focus in the last thirty years on developing and characterizing nanostructure materials. Nowadays, the goal is to utilize these materials as precursors to build nanoscale devices and to develop novel approaches to assemble these precursor nanostructurs into a functional device. Biology offers an excellent guide for assembling nanostructures since a cell can produce thousands of different functional units with only 20-different amino acid building blocks. Biomolecules such as proteins, oligonucleotides and microbial systems have been successfully applied toward organizing nanostructures into macrostructures. Although we have not built complex and functional nanostructures, there are numerous examples in the literature that demonstrate the utility of simple monofunctional nanostructures for biosensing and imaging applications, and drug storage/release systems. In the future, the ability to assemble nanostructures into complex functional units should produce novel systems that will have a broad and significant impact.