His salt-and-pepper beard and hunched posture make him look older than his 49 years. Sitting on the corner of a bed in a Palo Alto hotel room, Drexler is bloodied but combative. In remarks so overheated that they bordered on bizarre, he accused Drexler of terrorizing the world with the prospect that self-reproducing assemblers might escape the lab and devour everything in their path, turning the Earth into an inert, undifferentiated blob of gray goo. It was a public takedown from the man fast replacing Drexler as nano’s leading light. "Chemistry of the complexity, richness, and precision needed to come anywhere close to making a molecular assembler - let alone a self-replicating assembler - cannot be done simply by mushing two molecular objects together," Smalley wrote.
#The incredible shrinking man series#
On December 1, the technical journal Chemical and Engineering News published a series of letters between Drexler and Smalley in which the Nobelist made his position clear: Molecular assembly is impossible. Six months before the NanoSummit, his critics landed what may be a decisive one-two punch. Yet there have always been scientists who considered Drexler part of the lunatic fringe. "He got people to buy into the idea that there are really neat things you can do by thinking small. "Drexler captured the imagination, especially of younger people," says William Goddard, a Caltech professor who specializes in molecular simulations. Drexler’s vision inspired a generation of chemists, computer scientists, and engineers to focus on science at the nanoscale. In the air, they could remove pollutants. In the bloodstream, tiny machines could cure diseases. Start with a black box of so-called molecular assemblers, pour in a supply of cheap chemicals, and out would flow a profusion of gasoline, diamonds, rocket ships, whatever, all built without significant expenditure of capital or labor. He imagined a sea of minuscule robots that could move molecules so quickly and position them so precisely that they could produce almost any substance out of ordinary ingredients in a matter of hours. Back in 1977, while an undergrad at MIT, Drexler came up with a mind-boggling idea. There was only one person missing: Eric Drexler, the undisputed godfather of nanotechnology, the man who coined the term. In between, luminaries from the increasingly glamorous world of nanotechnology outlined the fledgling discipline’s future. The closing address was delivered by Richard Smalley, the Rice University chemist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for discovering Buckminsterfullerene, a soccer ball-shaped carbon molecule, and its permutations, known as fullerenes. Former chief arms control negotiator Paul Robinson spoke at a luncheon. At the Department of Energy’s NanoSummit, held in June in Washington, DC, energy secretary Spencer Abraham gave the opening speech before an array of scientists from universities, industry, and national labs. It was a clear sign that the world’s smallest technology had hit the big time.
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