By JUDY SIEGEL, GREER FAY CASHMAN
President Shimon Peres will present Pope Benedict XVI on Monday with a unique gift that requires an electron microscope to appreciate: the text of the Jewish Bible in vowelled Hebrew inscribed on a nanotechnology particle about the size of a grain of sand.
The 0.5-square-millimeter particle - much smaller than a pinhead - was prepared at Haifa's Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Russell Berry Nanotechnology Institute, and was the brainchild of institute director Prof. Uri Sivan.
The project was executed by doctoral student Ohad Zohar, who developed a special computer program to produce the microscopic text. The two men delivered it to Peres on Friday.
The nano-Bible was set on a transparent base only one centimeter high, accompanied by Hebrew and English text explaining how it was produced.
The first 13 verses of Genesis are shown printed 10,000 times larger than the original nanotext.
Peres has long been one of Israel's leading promoters of nanotechnology, which could be used in the future to store data on DNA or other biological molecules.