"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." -- K. Eric Drexler
Dr. Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955 in Alameda, 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 asthe 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.
"After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.""An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs.""And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one.""Any powerful technology can be abused.""But if we can manage it so people don't have things forced on them that they don't want, I think there's every reason to believe things can settle out in a situation that is recognizably better than the one we're stuck in today.""But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.""I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.""I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else.""If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have.""In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.""It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits.""Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.""My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.""My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.""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.""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.""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 really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.""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.""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."
K. Eric Drexler was very strongly influenced by ideas on Limits to Growth in the early 1970s. His response in his first year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to seek out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Dr. Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton University, a physicist famous for a strong focus on particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization. Drexler was involved in NASA summer studies in 1975 and 1976. Besides working summers for O'Neill building mass driver prototypes, he delivered papers at the first three Space Manufacturing conferences at Princeton. The 1977 and 1979 papers were co-authored with Keith Henson, and patents were issued on both subjects, vapor phase fabrication and space radiators.
Drexler participated in NASA summer studies on space colonies in 1975 and 1976. He fabricated metal films a few tens of nanometers thick on a wax support to demonstrate the potentials of high performance solar sails. He was active in space politics, helping the L5 Society defeat the Moon Treaty in 1980.
During the late 1970s, he began to develop ideas about molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In 1979, Drexler encountered Richard Feynman's provocative 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. The term nanotechnology was coined by the Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometer tolerances, and was unknowingly appropriated by Drexler in his 1986 book The Coming Era of Nanotechnology to describe what later became known as molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In that book, he proposed the idea of a nanoscale "assembler" which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity. He also first published the term "grey goo" to describe what might happen if a hypothetical self-replicating molecular nanotechnology went out of control.
Drexler holds three degrees from MIT [1]. He received his B.S. in Interdisciplinary Sciences in 1977 and his M.S. in 1979 in Astro/Aerospace Engineering with a Master's thesis titled "Design of a High Performance Solar Sail System,." In 1991 he earned a Ph.D. under the auspices of the MIT Media Lab (formally, the Media Arts and Sciences Section, School of Architecture and Planning). His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and (after some editing) his thesis, "Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation," was published as "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation" (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.
Drexler and Christine Peterson, at that time husband and wife, founded the Foresight Institute in 1986 with the mission of "Preparing for nanotechnology.” Drexler and Peterson ended their 21-year marriage in 2002. Drexler is no longer a member of the Foresight Institute.
In August 2005 Drexler joined Nanorex, a molecular engineering software company based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, to serve as the company's Chief Technical Advisor.[2][3] Nanorex's nanoENGINEER-1 software was reportedly able to simulate a hypothetical differential gear design in "a snap". According to Nanorex's web site, an open source molecular design program is currently slated for release in Fall 2007.
In 2006, Drexler married Rosa Wang, a former investment banker who works with Innovators for the Public on improving the social capital markets.
Drexler's work on nanotechnology was criticized as naive by Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley in a 2001 Scientific American article. Smalley first argued that "fat fingers" made MNT impossible. He later argued that nanomachines would have to resemble chemical enzymes more than Drexler's assemblers and could only work in water. Drexler maintained that both were straw man arguments, and in the case of enzymes, Prof. Klibanov wrote in 1994, "...using an enzyme in organic solvents eliminates several obstacles. . . " [4]) Drexler had difficulty in getting Smalley to respond, but in December 2003, Chemical and Engineering news carried a 4 part debate. [5] Ray Kurzweil spends four pages in his book 'The Singularity Is Near' [pp 193-196] to showing that Richard Smalley's arguments are not valid, and disputing them point by point. Kurzweil ends by stating that Drexler's visions are very practicable and even happening already.
One of the barriers to achieving molecular nanotechnology is the lack of an efficient way to create machines on a molecular/atomic scale. One of Drexler's early ideas was an "assembler", a nanomachine that would comprise an arm and a computer that could be programmed to build more nanomachines. If an assembler could be built, it might then build a copy of itself, and thus potentially be useful for efficient mass production of nanomachines. But the lack of a way to first build an assembler remains the sine qua non obstacle to achieving this vision.
A second difficulty in reaching molecular nanotechnology is design. Hand design of a gear or bearing at the level of atoms is a grueling task. While Drexler, Merkle and others have created a few designs of simple parts, no comprehensive design effort for anything approaching the complexity of a Model T Ford has been attempted.
A third difficulty in achieving molecular technology is separating successful trials from failures, and elucidating the failure mechanisms of the failures. Unlike Darwinian evolution, which proceeds by random variations in ensembles of organisms combined with deterministic reproduction/extinction as a selection process to achieve great complexity after billions of years (a set of mechanisms that Richard Dawkins has referred to as a "blind watchmaker"), deliberate design and building of nanoscale mechanisms requires a means other than reproduction/extinction to winnow successes from failures. Such means are difficult to provide (and presently non-existent) for anything other than small assemblages of atoms viewable by an AFM or STM.
Thus, even in the latest report A Matter of Size: Triennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative put out by the National Academies Press in December 2006, (roughly twenty years after Engines of Creation was published) no clear way forward toward molecular nanotechnology is seen, as per the conclusion on page 108 of that report: "Although theoretical calculations can be made today, the eventually attainablerange of chemical reaction cycles, error rates, speed of operation, and thermodynamicefficiencies of such bottom-up manufacturing systems cannot be reliablypredicted at this time. Thus, the eventually attainable perfection and complexity ofmanufactured products, while they can be calculated in theory, cannot be predictedwith confidence. Finally, the optimum research paths that might lead to systemswhich greatly exceed the thermodynamic efficiencies and other capabilities ofbiological systems cannot be reliably predicted at this time. Research funding thatis based on the ability of investigators to produce experimental demonstrationsthat link to abstract models and guide long-term vision is most appropriate toachieve this goal."
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Available online in Italian as MOTORI DI CREAZIONE: L’era prossima della nanotecnologia
Unbounding the Future (1991; with Christine Peterson and Gayle Pergamit) (ISBN 0-688-12573-5)
Available online with free download at Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation (1992)
Sample chapters and a table of contents are available online at e.drexler.com
Drexler's doctoral thesis, Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation, an earlier version of the text that became Nanosystems, is available online
Engines of Creation 2.0: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology - Updated and Expanded, K. Eric Drexler, 647 pages, (February 2007) - illustrated pdf edition, free download
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis, 1990. ISBN 0-201-56751-2
"The Creator": Interview with Eric Drexler by Michael Berry, 1991
Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology by Ed Regis, 1995. ISBN 0-316-73852-2
"The Incredible Shrinking World of Eric Drexler": Red Herring Interview by Anthony B. Perkins August 1, 1995
"The Incredible Shrinking Man: K. Eric Drexler was the godfather of nanotechnology. But the MIT prodigy who dreamed up molecular machines was shoved aside by big science - and now he's an industry outcast." Ed Regis, Wired Magazine, Issue 12.10, October 2004
Drexler is mentioned in the science fiction book The Diamond Age as one of the heroes of a future world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous.
In the science fiction novel Newton's Wake by Ken Macleod a 'drexler' is a nanotech assembler of pretty much anything that can fit in the volume of the particular machine - socks to starships.
Drexler is also mentioned in the science fiction book Decipher by Stel Pavlou, his book is mentioned as one of the starting points of the nanomachine construction, as well as giving a better understanding of the way carbon 60 was to be applied.
James Rollins references Drexler's Engines of Creation in his novel Excavation, using his theory of a molecular machine in two sections as a possible explanation for the mysterious "Substance Z" in the story.
Drexler gets a mention in the late Dr. Timothy Leary's Design for Dying in the "Mutation" section, briefly detailing the 8 Circuit Consciousness model. (pg. 91).