Development of General Capabilities for Molecular Manipulation

HollyMinkowski

Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955 in Almeda, California) is an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at MIT was revised and published as the book "Nanosystems Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He also coined the term grey goo.


I'd really like to get to know this interesting man!

Eric said...
Development of the ability to design protein molecules will open a path to the fabrication of devices to complex atomic specifications, thus sidestepping obstacles facing conventional microtechnology. This path will involve construction of molecular machinery able to position reactive groups to atomic precision. It could lead to great advances in computational devices and in the ability to manipulate biological materials. The existence of this path has implications for the present.

Feynman's 1959 talk entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"1 discussed microtechnology as a frontier to be pushed back, like the frontiers of high pressure, low temperature, or high vacuum. He suggested that ordinary machines could build smaller machines that could build still smaller machines, working step by step down toward the molecular level; he also suggested using particle beams to define two-dimensional patterns. Present microtechnology (exemplified by integrated circuits) has realized some of the potential outlined by Feynman by following the same basic approach: working down from the macroscopic level to the microscopic.

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