K. Eric Drexler Quotes

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn’t a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we’re third.

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don’t have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines – of molecular machines that are part of replicators – and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

On the molecular scale, you find it’s reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.