It's a Small, Small World
Source: Reason Online
"Nanotechnology" promises endless abundance courtesy of
molecule-manipulating robots. Is that nuts? And do we want it?
On June 26, 1992, at exactly 9:30 in the morning, K. Eric Drexler
arrives unaccompanied at room 53 of the Russell Senate Office Building.
Drexler's got a briefcase in one arm and a white cardboard box in the other. In
the box are 50 copies of his prepared statement, a nine-page document headed,
"Testimony of Dr. K. Eric Drexler on Molecular Nanotechnology before the Senate
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Science,
Technology and Space." Drexler has been called to Washington, where he's come at
his own expense, from San Francisco, to tell the country's leaders about his
fabulous intellectual creation, his trailblazing new idea, one that, if
successfully developed, would stand civilization on its head.
His scheme is to manufacture objects from the molecules up. You'd
make things by ma nipulating individual atoms and molecules, working with them
one at a time, positioning them precisely, lining them up one by one,
repeatedly, until enough of them accumulated to form a large-scale, usable
entitysuch as a car or spaceship, for example. All this would be done
automatically, effortlessly, without human hands or labor, by a fleet of tiny,
invisible robots. These robots, when they were developed, would do all the
world's work: People could sit back and enjoy themselves, drinking their mint
juleps in peace and quiet.
This was called "nanotechnology." The robots were called
"assemblers." Drexler was called "crazy." Or at least that was how some people
regarded him the first time they heard about this radical new scheme of his.
But Al Gore, the subcommittee chairman and the man who within the
next few days would be announced as Bill Clinton's running mate, was a big fan
of nanotechnology. At any rate he seemed to be au courant with the subject.
"What you're talking about when you use the phrase molecular
nanotechnology, is really a brand new approach to fabrication, to
manufacturing," Gore said to his witness. "The way we make things now, we take
some substance in bulk and then whittle down the bulk to the size of the
component we need, and then put different components together, and make
something. What you're describing with the phrase molecular nanotechnology is a
completely different approach which rests on the principle that your first
building block is the molecule itself. And you're saying that we have all of the
basic research breakthroughs that we need to build things one molecule at a
timeall we need is the applications of the research necessary to really do it.
And you're saying that the advantages of taking a molecular approach are really
quite startling."
Really quite startling. That was the truth.
Nanotechnology, Drexler had explained in articles and books, could
achieve all manner of wonders. The properties of a given object, after all, were
a function of the arrangements of its atoms and molecules. It followed from this
that if you could control those arrangements you could control every physical
attribute of that object: You'd have effectively "complete control of the
structure of matter," as Drexler had often put it.
Complete control of the structure of matter meant complete control
of human biology, and that in turn meant the eradication of disease and aging.
Disease, basically, was a molecular phenomenon, a matter of various crucial
molecules being out of place. Sickle-cell anemia, for example, was a result of a
single specific amino acid being erroneously located in the structure of
hemoglobin: Where a molecule of glutamic acid should be, a molecule of valine
appeared in stead. One displaced amino acid and the person could not process
oxygen normally. But that could be fixed if you could put the relevant molecules
back where they belonged. Aging, like wise, was a case of molecular loss and
misplacement, a condition that could be "cured" by putting the right molecules
in the right places. With fleets of tiny programmed robots streaming through
your body and blood, all kinds of cellular repairs would be possible.
Another thing nanotechnology meant was the elimination of poverty.
Drexler's invisible robots would manufacture so many material goods so cheaply
that people could have every physical thing they wanted.
A third thing it meant was the abolition of hunger. With
nanotechnology you could synthe size food at home, in a box, from the cheapest
possible ingredients. You could turn dirt into steak if you wanted to.
That was an idea Drexler came up with in his college days, at MIT
in the late 1970s. Once you had the ability to deal with atoms on an individual
basis, you could invent this black boxa "meat machine"that would physically
transform common materials into fresh beef. The machine might be about the size
and shape of a microwave oven, and it would work the way a microwave oven did,
too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clip pings
or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door,
fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out
would roll a wad of fresh beef.
Well, it sounded incredible. But when you thought about it, so did
the fact that cattle made beef. What materials did they have to work with, after
all, but grass, air, water, and sunlight? Not one of these things looked
remotely like steak. Cattle made beef by placing the required mol ecules into
the necessary configurations; Drexler's meat machine would do the same thing.
The meat machine would be a mechanical cow, a factory at the level
of atoms. This was to be understood quite literally: Molecules would be stacked
on tiny pallets which would move about on tiny tracks. There would be molecular
conveyor belts and rollers, vacuum pumps and sorting mills, gears and sprockets
and springs and ball bearings. And there would be fleets of molecular
manipulator armsthe "assemblers." An assembler would physically grab onto a
molecule, taking it from the pallet or conveyor belt or wherever, bring it to
the piece of meat under construction, and mechanically force the molecule into
position. Billions of such assem blers working in parallel, each of them cycling
back and forth millions of times per second, could synthesize chunks of beef
that were absolutely indistinguishable from a cow's.
And if Drexler's assemblers could arrange the right molecules the
right ways, then they could build not just meat but practically anything.
Nanotechnology would be the universal building engine, the molecular cornucopia.
When people were told about nanotechnology and all its magical
wonders the first thing they wanted to know was: When will it happen? How many
thousands of years will it take? Which, at the Senate hearing, was what Gore
asked Drexler.
Drexler hated to make predictions about human beings and how long
it would take them to accomplish a given thing. Nevertheless, since he was
always asked the When will it happen? question he had worked out an answer, and
after some hemming and hawing, he gave it: "I commonly answer that 15 years
would not be surprising for major, large-scale applications."
Fifteen years. If this was to be believed, a rather strange
situation was now occurring in the halls of Congress. A scientist was calmly
informing the authorities that in the time it took for a newborn babe to reach
adolescence, the country would be on the verge of the biggest and most sudden
change in its history: Physical labor, assembly lines, paychecks would be things
of the past; disease and aging would be gone and forgotten; poverty and hunger
would be wiped out.
And all of it would happen in 15 years!
But not a word of it ever got out to the press. This was puzzling.
Or maybe it wasn't. "We only cover things that actually happen,"
said a Time editor, "not things that are just supposed to happen." In fact,
maybe his whole scheme was nuts after all. Scientists, some of them, had some
rather bad things to say about Eric Drexler.
Calvin Quate, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford,
said: "I don't think he should be taken seriously. He's too far out."
Nanotechnology itself came off no better.
"It's this basic hand-waving stuff that anyone can do," said Kurt
Mislow, a Princeton University chemist. "It's like science fiction, and it turns
me off in a major kind of way."
It was science fiction, so the argument went, because atoms
couldn't be manipulated as if they were bricks. You couldn't pin them down or
hold them in place, much less maneuver them around like marbles as Mr. Nano
wanted to do. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the pillar of modern physics,
put paid to that idea.
Plus, molecules were always jostling and bouncing and twitching
around; they were always in constant motion. How could you build a mechanical
device out of parts that never stood still?
And if by some miracle both those difficulties could be escaped
and avoided, then radiation or friction or some other atomic complication would
attack your little nano-mechanism and mangle it beyond belief. So much for
Drexler's nano dreams.
The skeptics had a bit of explaining to do, however, when the name
of Richard Feynman cropped up, as it invariably did. Even Al Gore knew about
Feynman.
He said, "The best evidence that the research breakthroughs and
the conceptual break throughs have long since occurred is that Dr. Richard
Feynman made a speech 33 years ago in which he essentially outlined the whole
field, and even researchers at the cutting edge today were sort of surprised
when they went back and read the speech, and found out that the basic concept
had been available for a long time."
Drexler never liked to hear this, that Feynman had more or less
said it all, way back in the Dark Ages of 33 years ago. He said, "Feynman did
indeed point in these directions, in a talk in December of 1959, and that has
been an inspiration to many people."
The important point, however, was that Feynman had claimed that
working with atoms was entirely feasible. "The principles of physics, as far as
I can see," he'd said, "do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering
things atom by atom. It is not an attempt to violate any laws; it is something,
in principle, that can be done." But if Feynman, the Nobel Prizewinning
physicist the number-two genius, some said, after Einsteinif Feynman had said
that way back in 1959, then why were the skeptics complaining, years later, that
nanotechnology was "science fiction"?
The skeptics had a further bit of explaining to do when in 1989,
exactly 30 years after Feynman predicted it, individual atoms were in fact
pinned down, moved, and bodily manipu lated despite all the obstacles. This feat
was performed at the IBM Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, California, when
experimenters dragged 35 individual atoms of xenon around on a surface until
they spelled out the letters IBM.
Suddenly there was a burst of atomic-level creativity in
laboratories all over the United States, Germany, and Japan, as hands-on
researchers experienced an urgent experimental need to do things like write
their names out in atoms, spell the word Peace in sulfur molecules, and draw
sketches of Albert Einstein in a medium of mixed ions, all of which were
accomplished within the next few months.
This was primitive stuff, admittedly, compared to what Eric
Drexler was talking about. Still, it was clear that things were beginning to
happen down there in the atomic depths. And it was clear that Feynman, at least,
had been right all along.
In November of 1993, Rice University announced a "nanotechnology
initiative." The idea was to put up a new building on the campus in Houston and
populate it with nano-inclined experts from various fields and departments. Here
researchers would create the founding works of the new realm: the molecules, the
structures, the nanomachines of the future. The prime force behind the
initiative was one Richard E. Smalley, that rarest of all birds in academic
circles, a confessed admirer of Eric Drexler.
"I'm a fan of his," he said. "And in fact in my endeavors to
explain to people what I thought the future was, particularly the board of
governors here at Rice, I have given them copies of some of Eric's books."
That future, in Smalley's view, included nanotechnology in a
fundamental way.
"Science and technology on the nanometer scale is very likely to
be one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. It may even be
the most important. Why should we be teaching students to become scientists and
engineers in the old technology? They should be part of the future."
Smalley himself hoped to be part of the future. In 1985, he and
some colleagues had placed a small bit of graphite inside a laser vaporization
apparatus and discovered that they'd created a strange new form of carbon.
Carbon was known to occur naturally in the form of "network
solids" such as graphite and diamond. In both of those forms, each carbon atom
was connected to four others, and each of those to four more, and so on, in
large spread-out networks. In graphite, these networks ran in flat sheets, the
layers of which slid across each other easily. In diamond, by contrast, the
atoms were ordered in rigid three-dimensional cubes, the arrangement that gave
diamond its hardness. For years it was thought that this was the only way in
which carbon came: in long-drawn-out continuous systems.
But when Smalley and cohorts zapped some graphite in their
super-duper laser beam gadget, they got a bunch of microscopic carbon marbles
instead, a hitherto unknown form of the element. Sixty separate carbon atoms had
somehow gotten together and joined up to compose a discrete and self-contained
molecule, a tiny hollow sphere. Further examination revealed that the sphere had
a soccer-ball-like shape, consisting of 32 faces: 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.
Smalley and crew named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene" ("buckyball," for
short), after the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, which they closely
resembled.
For several reasons, the buckyball (chemical designation: C60)
caused a mania among working chemists. For one thing, the molecule had an
undeniable aesthetic appeal: "It is literally the roundest of round molecules,"
said Smalley, "the most symmetric molecule possible in three -dimensional
Euclidean space."
Second, buckyballs gave rise to some extremely unusual electrical
behavior. Depending on how C60 was mixed together ("doped") with other
substances, it could function as an insulator, a conductor, a semiconductor, or
a superconductor. By any measure, that was a lot of ways for one and the same
molecule to operate.
Third, because it was a hollow, open structure, C60 allowed other
atoms to be trapped, or "caged," inside it. Accordingly, chemists now placed
atoms of various elementspotassium, cesium, and even uraniuminside buckyballs,
and gleefully spoke of "shrink-wrapping an atom."
The buckyball was a grand new toy in the chemists' playpen, one on
which they lavished untold amounts of "research," generating some 1,400
scientific papers about it and related fullerenes in the space of a few years.
"We're like kids who have just discovered Tinkertoys," said Donald Huffman of
the University of Arizona.
Rick Smalley, however, wanted his "babies" to do real work. He was
much excited, then, by the addition of the buckytube (a single-walled carbon
pipe, also called a "nanotube") to the ranks of fullerenes. Buckytubes were
anticipated to have all sorts of fantastic nameless applications, but Smalley
himself actually came up with one: the "nanofinger," a long slender rod with
which to move atoms. Put two such rods together, like tweezers, and you'd have
yourself an atomic "hand."
"A great milestone would be to get two nanofingers together so you
can pick something up," he said. "So far the image you get of the [scanning
tunneling microscope, the device used to manipulate atoms to spell IBM] and
these local-probe things is that you've got a finger and you're moving it around
on a table and moving it up and down. In fact a better analogy is your elbow,
something that's not long and skinny but is big and fat.
"I think that a buckytube being the probe of an STM would be a
help, probably even qualitatively a help, but the big breakthrough will be to
get two of them so you can oppose them, like Chinese chopsticks. It's like the
development of the opposing thumb, to pick things up. We have no way right now
of picking something up by holding it between two things. The opposing thumb
would be a major advance."
Conceivably, it would take us one step closer to the Great Nano
Future as envisioned by Eric Drexler.
Drexler had worked out an entire argument, a proof, that the
nanotech revolution could hardly be avoided. Premise one was the "multiple
pathways" point, the observation that there were many distinct alternative
routes, all of them leading toward the fabled assemblers.
There was, for example, the protein-engineering pathway, where
you'd construct an amino acid sequence that would fold up into the shape of a
molecular machine, or at least into the shape of a lesser component. Or, there
were now a bunch of probes with which you could position atoms exactly where you
wanted them, to gain the same result. And finally there was the self -assembly
route, where you'd design molecules to have such shapes and bonding sites that
they'd fit together precisely, lock-and-key fashion, to produce a functional
device.
Premise two was that there were rewards and payoffs at every step
of the way, along each of the various routes. And you could reap those rewards
quite aside from the goal of creating a molecular manufacturing technology. You
didn't have to be a believer in the greater Drexlerian vision.
And then finally, when those various techniques and pathways had
been refined to the point where the goal of molecular manufacturing was actually
within reach, nanotechnology would appear as a huge and attainable boon; this
was premise three. The lure of it all would be too powerful to resist.
In fact, each of Drexler's "multiple pathways" was soon marked off
with a row of new nano-milestones. Researchers had, for example, come up with
ways of incorporating "unnatural" amino acids into proteins. The proteins of all
living things were combinations of naturally occur ring amino acids, but there
were only 20 different naturally occurring amino acids whereas some 60 or more
were chemically possible. Soon enough, scientists had figured out ways of
getting the cells to produce "unnatural" amino acids, substances they were never
meant to build.
It was wonderful news to nano fans, who saw a whole new range of
possibilities opening up in front of them.
But if nature's amino acids were entirely dispensable, then why
not the proteins them selves? Maybe you could have a protein substitute, a mock
protein, an alternate material that you could engineer and fool with to your
heart's content.
Now, any calm and skeptical reader might have seen this as yet
another case of "science fiction" gussied up as science, but a few years after
Drexler had predicted it, even that rather farfetched item had actually been
invented. In 1993 researchers at the University of California, Berkeley created
an analog polypeptide (a substitute protein, essentially), called an
oligocarbamate. This new substance had a molecular backbone and side chains just
like conven tional proteins did, but it was made out of slightly different
materials, ones which had the added attraction of being both stiff and highly
controllable. In short order, the inventors had developed a "library" of some
256 oligocarbamate structures.
So now there were these substitute proteins to work with. A whole
new pathway!
And then, suddenly, there was the "artificial atom."
This was so bizarre an invention that neither Drexler himself nor,
very probably, anyone else, had ever even remotely anticipated it. How could
there be an artificial atom? But Raymond Ashoori, a physicist at AT&T Bell
Labs, had created onean atom whose electron count was controllable by its human
maker, from zero to 60.
The "atom" in question was actually an empty space within a
gallium arsenide crystal to which electrons could be moved one at a time by the
application of a light magnetic pulse. In the case of an ordinary,
garden-variety atom, electrons were held in place by the nucleus, whose positive
charge attracted and bound the negatively charged electrons. In an "artificial
atom," by contrast, electrons were held, instead, by an externally imposed
magnetic field. But the final effect was much the same: a bunch of electrons
whizzing around in a small space.
Best of all, you could use this artificial-atom generatorthis "toy
box," as Ashoori called itto design your own atoms. "We can make atoms of any
size," he said. Horst Stormer, Ashoori's co-worker at AT&T, added: "You can
make any kind of artificial atomlong, thin atoms and big, round atoms."
The amazing conclusion, of course, was that maybe you could link
some of those newly created atoms together, thereby creating your own artificial
molecule. And then maybe you could join those artificial molecules together to
producewhy not?an artificial solid.
Was this not the blunt future already staring us smack in the
face? Here were two staid and serious corporate physicistspractical men,
laboratory typeshere they were talking about "real" versus "artificial" atoms,
the bright new amusements they'd made in their little "toy box."
Compared to which nanotechnology was not all that outlandish a
prospect. Nanotechnology, after all, only used nature's atoms, normal atoms, the
tiny marbles that during these latter 20th-century days had been individually
touched, pushed around, lifted and lowered, played with, bottled up, treated as
pets, and given their own names. All nanotechnology wanted to do was to take
those same objects and organize them into working machines.
Was that so crazy?
Nanotechnology would give you, as Eric Drexler had said,
"effectively complete control of the structure of matter"or as Rick Smalley had
put it, "as much control as you're going to get." But was such control worth
having?
Drexler pretty much took it for granted that having complete
control of the structure of matter was a fine thing, that reaching "the limits
of the possible" was a blessing. When Drexler considered the subject of
"consequences," he tended to think in terms of physical risks, the threat of
which had kept him mum about nanotechnology for three or four years after he'd
first gotten the idea. Later he spent inordinate amounts of time trying to come
up with strategies for avoiding the evil that people could do with an army of
nano helpers at their disposal.
The fact remained, though, that the physical risks of
nanotechnology might not be the worst ones. Far more serious might be those that
were social and psychological. Far more frightening, definitely more paralyzing
to the imagination, than the sight of nanotechnology going wrong was the
prospect of its going right, of its control over matter being all too complete.
Could people handle the largesse of it all? The abundance, the
bountythe boredom?
"It's going to be a very depressing state of affairs. Because
obviously people get very depressed unless they can do things for which they
feel challenged," said Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago
psychologist and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Happiness, he said, arose not from mindless leisure activities but
from confronting and surmounting challenges. Presented with no obstacles, the
mind was left with nothing to engage it, and wandered off into boredom, anxiety,
or worse. "That's usually what happens to people who retire, for instance."
"We'd have to find some new forms of expression and achievement,"
he said. "Otherwise people would just curl up and wither away."
Or otherwise they'd make trouble.
"In a sense it's already happened," said Garrett Hardin, the
evolutionary biologist. "Look, we have 10 million unemployed; the only thing
that keeps us from going crazy is the fact that we have television to divert
these people. If we didn't have television I think we'd be in a great deal of
trouble. We idle people and then we're surprised when they cause trouble, as in
the Los Angeles riots."
But what if, after nanotechnology, the masses were supplied with
all the material necessi ties of life?
"Most of the people involved in the Los Angeles riots had all the
necessities of life," he said. "They've got the necessities, what they don't
have is an interest in life. We deprive them of work. Basically I think
activityI won't say 'work,' activity is the primary requirement for human
existence."
Then was too much affluence a bad thing?
"Too much affluence is not a worry I've had in the contemporary
world," said Peter D. Kramer, psychiatrist and author of Listening to Prozac.
"The burden of poverty and need is so great that it just seems like such a long
way to a society in which there are no have-nots."
Well, but wouldn't the average person go crazy, after
nanotechnology, with nothing to do amid all the abundance?
"I can't imagine that," said Kramer. "There are many productive
rich people. I would like to see, in my own life, the effect of enormous
affluence on my productivity. It's a risk I'd be willing to take."
And even if life after nanotechnology was equivalent to being
retired, retirement was not necessarily the bad deal it was often cracked up to
be, said Kramer. "There are some people who are very contented in
retirementother than for the problem of aging. The problem is not enough healthy
retirement."
Still, there was something unnerving, something unwholesome about
the prospect of turning the world's work over to a bunch of invisible machines.
Lazing around in the sunshine, after all, was sloth, one of the seven deadly
sins. If you were to live like thateven just tempo rarily, as an experimentthe
odds were that something big was bound to go wrong, sooner or later.
There was an ethic behind that feeling, of course, the so-called
Protestant work ethic, the notion that honest drudgery was right and proper,
that toil was the morally fitting condition of humankind. But what was the
relevance of the work ethic in an age when physical labor was no longer
required? In the generation following the nano revolution, perhaps nobody would
give a moment's thought to the ancient and outmoded "work ethic."
Unless, of course, the work ethic was a fixed part of human
nature.
"People even work at their leisure!" said cultural anthropologist
Mary Catherine Bateson. "There's a basic human desire to feel you're achieving
something, whether you're keeping golf scores or doing your gardening."
All of which led to the question of how, after nanotechnology, the
basic human need to do work, to create value, to achieve, would be satisfied.
Were we going to pawn off elbow grease to the nanomachinesonly to be rewarded by
making ourselves miserable? Would the irony be that work was really the good
stuff of life, something that existence would be pointless without?
Plausible as that was, there were yet a few problems with it. For
one thing, the idea that people would be suicidal over no longer having to work
for a living, well, that was a bit strained on the face of it. Wouldn't they be
at least slightly relieved? After all, if they wanted to keep on working for a
living, there was nothing in nanotechnology to stop them.
And plenty of "ordinary" jobs would still be around for people to
do, even in the nano age: There'd be cops, reporters, lawyers, restaurant chefs,
waiters, judges, senators, writers, marriage counselors, mathematicians.
Nanomachines, talented as they were, weren't going to be masters of every
specialty.
Then, too, the notion of what counted as "work" would be
redefined, as it often had in the past.
"When housework was mechanized, standards rose," said Bateson.
"Our ancestors didn't change the sheets twice a week, more like twice a year,
probably."
And, she added, "The identical activity can be turned into work or
into leisure by being packaged differently." Gardening, for example, is
essentially the same activity as farmingbut in one case it is "recreation," and
in the other, "work." Nanotechnology would allow you to choose what was work,
instead of having brute nature foist that work upon you.
Beyond that was the fact that even after nanotechnology was
perfected, even after it had become widespread and freely available, not
everyone would take equal advantage of it.
Not everyone was going to want to get their food from a "meat
machine" or to live in a mock-wood, nanomachined house. When absolutely every
last person in the neighborhood could produce their own Hope diamond how much
more stylish it would be to wear, instead, a piece of handmade wrought iron.
Often enough it was the surpassingly primitivethe native, the simple, the basic
and plainthat was the sign of genuine taste and refinement, as in the case of
the suburban American fireplace, which, in the late 20th century, was the
ultimate piece of home furnishing. It was a basic error, apparently, to think
that all would be nano in the Nano Age.
As to how it would in fact work out, in detail, that was something
that nobody could know until it actually happened. In the end, the case could be
made that what nanotechnology meant for the human specieswhether it was a
godsend or a moral disasterwas not an issue that could be decided in advance.
Indeed, it might not be decidable even afterwards.
Since when were social questions ever "decided" in any true sense
anyway? After all, they weren't like scientific questions where you could
immediately run to nature, or to experiment, or to computer simulation, for
verification or disproof of a given answer.
And even within science itself there were exceptions to the rule.
In mathematics, for example, some questions were said to be "formally
undecidable," which meant that they were not susceptible of resolution by any
known or imaginable method. There was also a separate class of problems to which
there were in fact answers, only the answers were unknowable in advance on
account of the inherent complexity of the situation--the weather on a given day
50 years from now, for example. Such problems were said to be "computationally
irreducible" or "intractable." There was no way of calculating the answer that
was faster than just waiting around for the actual outcome.
Maybe the ultimate meaning of nanotechnology was not knowable in
advance. You couldn't predict itamp; you simply had to let it happen. You had to
make it work, you had to make it turn out for the best, rather than decide,
beforehand, that it was going to be heaven on earth or hell on wheels.
Ralph Merkle, Drexler's right-hand man when it came to molecular
simulations, had a saying about this. When he traveled around giving lectures
and spreading the nano dream, he'd always finish up the same way, with the same
bright quotation which seemed to ccapture the right spirit in words. He'd
project it up there on the screen, his final thought, his cclosing message: "The
best way to predicct the future is to create it."
Ed Regis is the author of Who got Einstein's Office? and Great
Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition. This article is adapted from his
recccently published book Nano:The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology
(Little,Brown). This is the second article in a multi-author series on science
and society.
Visit the Forsight Institute for more information on
nanotechnology.
by Ed Regis
http://reason.com/9512/REGISfeat.html