Eric Drexler, the author of Nanosystems and Engines of Creation, launches his own blog today – Metamodern. The topics he’s covered so far include DNA nanotechnology and nanoplasmonics; these, to my mind, are a couple of the most exciting areas of modern nanoscience.
In the various debates about nanotechnology that have taken place over the years, not least on this blog, one sometimes has the sense that some of the people who presume to speak on behalf of Drexler and his ideas aren’t necessarily doing him any favours, so I’m looking forward to reading about what Drexler is thinking about now, directly from the source.
Agreed, Drexler’s ideas became a bandwagon that was so jumped on that most of the original ideas were buried under a mass punch up between transhumanists, trekkies, idealists, and a whole bunch of investors who were too dumb to learn the lessons from what just happened in the dot.com crash – hardly of any of whom had a clue about the science that Drexler was talking about.
Having a large number of web savvy people taking nanosystems as some kind of inviolable creed made things even worse. Despite wining the Foresight Communications Prize a few years ago, there were plenty that saw my views (and those of most of the main stream scientific community) as some kind of apostatical heresy.
The legacy lingers on – yesterday’s Times reported that Cambridge University had been given a large nanotechnology grant to research tiny machines….
In defense of Cambridge (I am a current grad student), the grant is not to “research tiny machines”, but for the “assembly of functional nanomaterials and devices”. This is a long way from tiny robots repairing my blood cells or building me an instant cheese sandwich.
However, rather than attempting to speak for an entire programme with which I am not associated, I advise anyone interested to see here for the facts.
http://np.phy.cam.ac.uk/NanoDTC1.htm