Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution
Chapter 1: Looking Forward
The Japanese professor and his American visitor paused in the rain to look at a rising concrete structure on a university campus in the Tokyo suburbs near Higashikoganei Station. "This is for our Nanotechnology Center," Professor Kobayashi said. The professor's guest complimented the work as he wondered to himself, when would an American professor be able to say the same?
This Nanotechnology Center was being built in the spring of 1990, as Eric Drexler was midway through a hectic eight-day trip, giving talks on nanotechnology to researchers and seeing dozens of university and consortium research laboratories. A Japanese research society had sponsored the trip, and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry MITI) had organized a symposium around the visita symposium on molecular machines and nanotechnology. Japanese research was forging ahead, aiming to develop "new modes of science and technology in harmony with nature and human society," a new technology for the twenty-first century.
There is a view of the future that doesn't fit with the view
in the newspapers. Think of it as an alternative, a turn in the
road of future history that leads to a different world. In that
world, cancer follows polio, petroleum follows whale oil, and
industrial technology follows chipped flintall healed or
replaced. Old problems vanish, new problems appear: down the road
are many alternative worlds, some fit to live in, some not. We
aim to survey this road and the alternatives, because to arrive
at a world fit to live in, we will all need a better view of the
How does one begin to describe a process that can replace the
industrial system of the world? Physical possibilities, research
trends, future technologies, human consequences, political
challenges: this is the logical sequence, but none of these makes
a satisfactory starting point. The story might begin with
research at places like IBM, Du Pont, and the ERATO projects at
Tsukuba and RIKEN, but this would begin with molecules, seemingly remote
from human concerns. At the core of the story is a kind of
nanotechnology" or "molecular
manufacturing"that appears destined to replace
most of technology as we know it today, but it seems best not to
begin in the middle. Instead, it seems best to begin with a
little of each topic, briefly sketching consequences,
technologies, trends, and principles before diving into whole
chapters on one aspect or another. This chapter provides those
sketches and sets the stage for what follows.
All this can be read as posing a grand "What if?"
question: What if molecular manufacturing and its products
replace modern technology? If they don't, then the question
merely invites an entertaining and mind-stretching exercise. But
if they do, then working out good answers in advance may tip the
balance in making decisions that determine the fate of the world.
Later chapters will show why we see molecular manufacturing as
being almost inevitable, yet for now it will suffice if enough
people give enough thought to the question "What if?"
A Sketch of Technologies
Molecular nanotechnology: Thorough, inexpensive
control of the structure of matter based on
molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts; the
products and processes of molecular manufacturing.
Technology-as-we-know-it is a product of industry, of
manufacturing and chemical engineering. Industry-as-we-know-it
takes things from natureore from mountains, trees from
forestsand coerces them into forms that someone considers
useful. Trees become lumber, then houses. Mountains become
rubble, then molten iron, then steel, then cars. Sand becomes a
purified gas, then silicon, then chips. And so it goes. Each
process is crude, based on cutting, stirring, baking, spraying,
etching, grinding, and the like.
Trees, though, are not crude: To make wood and leaves, they
neither cut, grind, stir, bake, spray, etch, nor grind. Instead,
they gather solar energy using molecular electronic devices, the
photosynthetic reaction centers of chloroplasts. They use that
energy to drive molecular machinesactive devices
with moving parts of precise, molecular structurewhich
process carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and molecular
building blocks. They use other molecular machines to join these
molecular building blocks to form roots, trunks, branches, twigs,
solar collectors, and more molecular machinery. Every tree makes
leaves, and each leaf is more sophisticated than a spacecraft,
more finely patterned than the latest chip from Silicon Valley.
They do all this without noise, heat, toxic fumes, or human
labor, and they consume pollutants as they go. Viewed this way,
trees are high technology. Chips and rockets aren't.
Trees give a hint of what molecular nanotechnology will be
like, but nanotechnology won't be biotechnology because it won't
rely on altering life. Biotechnology is a further stage in the
domestication of living things. Like selective breeding, it
reshapes the genetic heritage of a species to produce varieties
more useful to people. Unlike selective breeding, it inserts new
genes. Like biotechnologyor ordinary treesmolecular
nanotechnology will use molecular machinery, but unlike
biotechnology, it will not rely on genetic meddling. It will be
not an extension of biotechnology, but an alternative or a
Molecular nanotechnology could have been conceived and
analyzedthough not builtbased on scientific knowledge
available forty years ago. Even today, as development
accelerates, understanding grows slowly because molecular
nanotechnology merges fields that have been strangers: the
molecular sciences, working at the threshold of the quantum
realm, and mechanical engineering, still mired in the grease and
crudity of conventional technology. Nanotechnology will be a
technology of new molecular machines, of gears and shafts and
bearings that move and work with parts shaped in accord with the
wave equations at the foundations of natural law. Mechanical
engineers don't design molecules. Molecular scientists seldom
design machines. Yet a new field will growis growing
todayin the gap between. That field will replace both
chemistry as we know it and mechanical engineering as we know it.
And what is manufacturing today, or modern technology itself, but
a patchwork of crude chemistry and crude machines?
Chapter 2 will paint a concrete
picture of molecular machines and molecular manufacturing, but
for now analogy will serve. Picture an automated factory, full of
conveyor belts, computers, rollers, stampers, and swinging robot
arms. Now imagine something like that factory, but a million
times smaller and working a million times faster, with parts and
workpieces of molecular size. In this factory, a
"pollutant" would be a loose molecule, like a
ricocheting bolt or washer, and loose molecules aren't tolerated.
In many ways, the factory is utterly unlike a living cell: not fluid, flexible,
adaptable, and fertile, but rigid, preprogrammed and specialized.
And yet for all of that, this microscopic molecular factory
emulates life in its clean, precise molecular construction.
Advanced molecular manufacturing will be able to make almost
anything. Unlike crude mechanical and chemical technologies,
molecular manufacturing will work from the bottom up, assembling
intricate products from the molecular building blocks that
underlie everything in the physical world.
Nanotechnology will bring new capabilities, giving us new ways
to make things, heal our bodies, and care for the environment. It
will also bring unwelcome advances in weaponry and give us yet
more ways to foul up the world on an enormous scale. It won't
automatically solve our problems: even powerful technologies
merely give us more power. As usual, we have a lot of work ahead
of us and a lot of hard decisions to make if we hope to harness
new developments to good ends. The main reason to pay attention
to nanotechnology now, before it exists, is to get a head start
on understanding it and what to do about it.
A Sketch of Consequences
The United States has become famous for its obsession with the
next year's elections and the next quarter's profits, and the
future be damned. Nonetheless, we are writing for normal human
beings who feel that the future mattersten, twenty, perhaps
even thirty years from nowfor people who care enough to try
to shift the odds for the better. Making wise choices with an eye
to the future requires a realistic picture of what the future can
hold. What if most pictures of the future today are based on the
Here are a few of today's common assumptions, some so familiar
that they are seldom stated:
Industrial development is the only alternative to
Many people must work in factories.
Greater wealth means greater resource consumption.
Logging, mining, and fossil-fuel burning must continue.
Manufacturing means polluting.
Third World development would doom the environment.
These all depend on a more basic assumption:
Industry as we know it cannot be replaced.
Some further common assumptions:
The twenty-first century will basically bring more of the
Today's economic trends will define tomorrow's problems.
Spaceflight will never be affordable for most people.
Forests will never grow beyond Earth.
More advanced medicine will always be more expensive.
Even highly advanced medicine won't be able to keep
Solar energy will never become really inexpensive.
Toxic wastes will never be gathered and eliminated.
Developed land will never be returned to wilderness.
There will never be weapons worse than nuclear missiles.
Pollution and resource depletion will eventually bring
war or collapse.
These, too, depend on a more basic assumption:
Technology as we know it will never be replaced.
These commonplace assumptions paint a future full of terrible
dilemmas, and the notion that a technological change will let us
escape from them smacks of the idea that some technological fix
can save the industrial system. The prospect, though, is quite
different: The industrial system won't be fixed, it will be
junked and recycled. The prospect isn't more industrial wealth
ripped from the flesh of the Earth, but green wealth unfolding
from processes as clean as a growing tree. Today, our industrial
technologies force us to choose better quality or lower
cost or greater safety or a cleaner environment.
Molecular manufacturing, however, can be used to improve quality and
lower costs and increase safety and clean the
environment. The coming revolutions in technology will transcend
many of the old, familiar dilemmas. And yes, they will bring
fresh, equally terrible dilemmas.
Molecular nanotechnology will bring thorough and inexpensive
control of the structure of matter. We need to understand
molecular nanotechnology in order to understand the future
capabilities of the human race. This will help us see the
challenges ahead, and help us plan how best to conserve values,
traditions, and ecosystems through effective policies and
institutions. Likewise, it can help us see what today's events
mean, including business opportunities and possibilities for
action. We need a vision of where technology is leading because
technology is a part of what human beings are, and will affect
what we and our societies can become.
The consequences of the coming revolutions will depend on
human actions. As always, new abilities will create new
possibilities both for good and for ill. We will discuss both,
focusing on how political and economic pressures can best be
harnessed to achieve good ends. Our answers will not be
satisfactory, but they are at least a beginning.
A Sketch of Trends
Technology has been moving toward greater control of the
structure of matter for millennia. For decades, microtechnology
has been building ever-smaller devices, working toward the
molecular size scale from the top down. For a century or more,
chemistry has been building ever-larger molecules, working up
toward molecules large enough to serve as machines. The research
is global, and the competition is heating up.
Since the concept of molecular nanotechnology was first laid
out, scientists have developed more powerful capabilities in
chemistry and molecular manipulation (see
Chapter 4). There is now a better picture of how those
capabilities can come together in the next steps (see Chapter 5), and of how advanced
molecular manufacturing can work (see
Chapter 6). Nanotechnology has arrived as an idea and as a
research direction, though not yet as a reality.
Naturally occurring molecular machines exist already.
Researchers are learning to design new ones. The trend is clear,
and it will accelerate because better molecular machines can help
build even better molecular machines. By the standards of daily
life, the development of molecular nanotechnology will be
gradual, spanning years or decades, yet by the ponderous
standards of human history it will happen in an eyeblink. In
retrospect, the wholesale replacement of twentieth-century
technologies will surely be seen as a technological revolution,
as a process encompassing a great breakthrough.
Today, we live in the end of the pre-breakthrough era, with
pre-breakthrough technologies, hopes, fears, and preoccupations
that often seem permanent, as did the Cold War. Yet it seems that
the breakthrough era is not a matter for some future generation,
but for our own. These developments are taking shape right now,
and it would be rash to assume that their consequences will be
many years delayed.
In later chapters, we'll say more about what researchers are
doing today, about where their work is leading, and about the
problems and choices ahead. To get a sense of the consequences,
though, requires a picture of what nanotechnology can do. This
can be hard to grasp because past advanced
technologiesmicrowave tubes, lasers, superconductors,
satellites, robots, and the likehave come trickling out of
factories, at first with high price tags and narrow applications.
Molecular manufacturing, though, will be more like computers: a
flexible technology with a huge range of applications. And
molecular manufacturing won't come trickling out of conventional
factories as computers did: it will replace factories and
replace or upgrade their products. This is something new and
basic, not just another twentieth-century gadget. It will arise
out of twentieth-century trends in science, but it will break the
trend-lines in technology, economics, and environmental affairs.
Calculators were once thousand-dollar desktop clunkers, but
microelectronics made them fast and efficient, sized to a child's
pocket and priced to a child's budget. Now imagine a revolution
of similar magnitude, but applied to everything else.
More Consequences: Scenes from a
What nanotechnology will mean for human life is beyond our
predicting, but a good way to understand what it could
mean is to paint scenarios. A good scenario brings together
different aspects of the world (technologies, environments, human
concerns) into a coherent whole. Major corporations
use scenarios to help envision the paths that the future may
takenot as forecasts, but as tools for thinking. In playing
the "What if?" game, scenarios present trial answers
and pose new questions.
The following scenarios can't represent what will happen,
because no one knows. They can, however, show how
post-breakthrough capabilities could mesh with human life and
Earth's environment. The results will likely seem quaintly
conservative from a future perspective, however much they seem
like science fiction today. The issues behind these scenarios
will be discussed in later chapters.
Scenario: Solar Energy
In Fairbanks, Alaska, Linda Hoover yawns and flips a
switch on a dark winter morning. The light comes on, powered
by stored solar electricity. The Alaska oil pipeline shut
down years ago, and tanker traffic is gone for good.
Nanotechnology can make solar cells efficient, as cheap as
newspaper, and as tough as asphalttough enough to use for
resurfacing roads, collecting energy without displacing any more
grass and trees. Together with efficient, inexpensive storage
cells, this will yield low-cost power (but no, not "too
cheap to meter"). Chapter 9
discusses prospects for energy and the environment in more depth.
Scenario: Medicine that Cures
Sue Miller of Lincoln, Nebraska, has been a bit hoarse for
weeks, and just came down with a horrid head cold. For the
past six months, she's been seeing ads for At Last!®: the
Cure for the Common Cold, so she spends her five dollars and
takes the nose-spray and throat-spray doses. Within three
hours, 99 percent of the viruses
in her nose and throat are gone, and the rest are on the run.
Within six hours, the medical mechanisms have become
inactive, like a pinch of inhaled but biodegradable dust,
soon cleared from the body. She feels much better and won't
infect her friends at dinner.
The human immune system is an intricate molecular
mechanism, patrolling the body for viruses and other
invaders, recognizing them by their foreign molecular coats.
The immune system, though, is slow to recognize something
new. For her five dollars, Sue bought 10 billion molecular
mechanisms primed to recognize not just the viruses she had
already encountered, but each of the five hundred most common
viruses that cause colds, influenza, and the like.
Weeks have passed, but the hoarseness Sue had before her
cold still hasn't gone away; it gets worse. She ignores it
through a long vacation, but once she's back and caught up,
Sue finally goes to see her doctor. He looks down her throat
and says, "Hmmm." He asks her to inhale an aerosol,
cough, spit in a cup, and go read a magazine. The diagnosis
pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample
into his cell analyzer.
Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels
chilled to read the diagnosis: a malignant cancer of the
throat, the same disease that has cropped up all too often in
his own mother's family.
He touches the "Proceed" button. In twenty
minutes, he looks at the screen to check progress. Yes, Sue's
cancerous cells are all of one basic kind, displaying one of
the 16,314 known molecular markers for malignancy. They can
be recognized, and since they can be recognized, they can be
destroyed by standard molecular machines primed to react to
those markers. The doctor instructs the cell analyzer to
prime some "immune
machines" to go after her cancer cells. He tests
them on cells from the sample, watches, and sees that they
work as expected, so he has the analyzer prime up some more.
Sue puts the magazine down and looks up. "Well, Doc,
what's the word?" she asks.
"I found some suspicious cells, but this should clear
it up," he says. He gives her a throat spray and an
injection. "I'd like you to come back in three weeks,
just to be sure."
"Do I have to?" she asks.
"You know," he lectures her, "we need to
make sure it's gone. You really shouldn't let things like
this go so far before coming in."
"Yes, fine, I'll make the appointment," she
says. Leaving the office, Sue thinks fondly of how
old-fashioned and conservative Dr. Fujima is.
The molecular mechanisms of the immune system already destroy
most potential cancers before they grow large enough to detect.
With nanotechnology, we will build molecular mechanisms to
destroy those that the immune system misses. Chapter 10 discusses medical
nanotechnologies in more depth.
Scenario: Cleansing the Soil
California Scout Troop 9731 has hiked for six days, deep
in the second-wilderness forests of the Pacific Northwest.
"I bet we're the first people ever to walk
here," says one of the youngest scouts.
"Well, maybe you're right about walking,"
says Scoutmaster Jackson, "but look up aheadwhat
do you see, scouts?"
Twenty paces ahead runs a strip of younger trees,
stretching left and right until it vanishes among the trunks
of the surrounding forest.
"Hey, guys! Another old logging road!" shouts an
older scout. Several scouts pull probes from their pockets
and fit them to the ends of their walking sticks. Jackson
smiles: It's been ten years since a California troop found
anything this way, but the kids keep trying.
The scouts fan out, angling their path along the scar of
the old road, poking at the ground and watching the readouts
on the stick handles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, comes a call:
"I've got a signal! WowI've got PCBs!"
In a moment, grinning scouts are mapping and tracing the
spill. Decades ago, a truck with a leaking load of chemical
waste snuck down the old logging road, leaving a thin toxic
trail. That trail leads them to a deep ravine, some rusted
drums, and a nice wide patch of invisible filth. The
excitement is electrifying.
Setting aside their maps and orienteering practice, they
unseal a satellite locator to log the exact latitude and
longitude of the site, then send a message that registers
their cleanup claim on the ravine. The survey done, they head
off again, eagerly planning a return trip to earn the
now-rare Toxic Waste Cleanup Merit Badge.
Today, tree farms are replacing wilderness. Tomorrow, the slow
return to wilderness may begin, when nature need no longer be
seen as a storehouse of natural resources to be plundered. Chapter 9 will discuss just how little
need be taken from nature to provide humans with wealth, and how
post-breakthrough technologies can remove from nature the toxic
residues of twentieth-century mistakes.
At the University of Michigan, Joel Gregory grabs a
molecular rod with both hands and twists. It feels a bit
weak, and a ripple of red reveals too much stress in a
strained molecular bond halfway down its length. He adds two atoms and twists the rod again:
all greens and blues, much better. Joel plugs the rod into
the mechanical arm he's designing, turns up the temperature,
and sets the whole thing in motion. A million atoms dance in
thermal vibration, gears spin, and the arm swings to and fro
in programmed motion. It looks good. A few parts are still
mock-ups, but doing a thesis takes time, and he'll work out
the rest of the molecular details later. Joel strips off the
computer display goggles and gloves and blinks at the real
world. It's time for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He grabs
the computer itself, stuffs it into his pocket, and heads for
the student center.
Researchers already use computers to build models of
molecules, and "virtual reality
systems" have begun to appear, enabling a user to walk
around the image of a molecule and "touch" it, using
computer-controlled gloves and goggles. We can't build a
supercomputer able to model a million-atom machine yetmuch
less build a pocket supercomputerbut computers keep
shrinking in size and cost. With nanotechnology to make molecular
parts, a computer like Joel's will become easy to build. Today's
supercomputers will seem like hand-cranked adding machines by
comparison. Chapters 2 and 3 take a closer look at a simulated
Scenario: Global Wealth
Behind a village school in the forest a stone's throw from
the Congo River, a desktop computer with a thousand times the
power of an early 1990s supercomputer lies half-buried in a
recycling bin. Indoors, Joseph Adoula and his friends have
finished their day's studies; now they are playing together
in a vivid game universe using personal computers each a
million times more powerful than the clunker in the trash.
They stay late in air-conditioned comfort.
Trees use air, soil, and sunlight to make wood, and wood is
cheap enough to burn. Nanotechnology can do likewise, making
products as cheap as woodeven products like supercomputers,
air conditioners, and solar cells to power them. The resulting
economics may even keep tropical forests from being burned. Chapter 7 will discuss how costs can fall
low enough to make material wealth for the Third World easy to
Scenario: Cleansing the Air
In Earth's atmosphere, the twentieth-century rise in
carbon-dioxide levels has halted and reversed. Fossil fuels
are obsolete, so pollution rates have lessened. Efficient
agriculture has freed fertile land for reforestation, so
growing trees are cleansing the atmosphere. Surplus solar
power from the world's repaved roads is being used to break
down excess carbon dioxide at a rate of 5 billion tons per
year. Climates are returning to normal, the seas are receding
to their historical shores, and ecosystems are beginning the
slow process of recovery. In another twenty years, the
atmosphere will be back to the pre-industrial composition it
had in the year 1800.
Chapter 9 will discuss
environmental cleanup, from reducing the sources to cleaning up
the messes already in place.
Scenario: Transportation Outward
Jim Salin's afternoon flight from Dulles International is
on the ground, late for departure. Impatiently, Jim checks
the time: any later, and he'll miss his connecting flight.
At last, the glassy-surfaced craft rolls down the runway.
With gliderlike wings, it lifts its fat body and climbs
steeply toward the east. A few pages into his novel, Jim is
interrupted by a second recitation of safety instructions and
the captain's announcement that they'll try to make up for
lost time. Jim settles back in his seat as the main engines
kick in, the wings retract, the acceleration builds, and the
sky darkens to black. Like the highest-performance rockets of
the 1980s, Jim's liner produces an exhaust of pure water
vapor. Spaceflight has become clean, safe, and routine. And
every year, more people go up than come down.
The cost of spaceflight is mostly the cost of
high-performance, reliable hardware. Molecular manufacturing will
make aerospace structures from nearly flawless, superstrong
materials at low cost. Add inexpensive fuel, and space will
become more accessible than the other side of the ocean is today.
Chapter 8 discusses the prospects for
opening the world beyond Earth.
Scenario: Restoring Species
Restoration Day Ceremonies are always moving events. For
some reason, the old people always cry, even though they say
Crying, Tracy Stiegler thinks, doesn't make any
sense. She looks again through the camouflage screen over
the sandy Triangle Keys beach, gazing across the Caribbean
toward the Yucatán Peninsula. Soon this will be theirs
again, and that's all to the good.
Tracy and the other scientists from BioArchive have
positions of honor in today's Restoration Day Ceremony. Since
the mid-twentieth century there had been no living Caribbean
monk seals, only grisly relics of the years of their
slaughter: seal furs and dry museum specimens. Tracy's team
struggled for years, gathering these relics and studying them
with molecular instruments. It had been known for
decadessince the 1980sthat genes are tough enough
to survive in dried skin, bone, horn, and eggshell. Tracy's
team had collected genes and rebuilt cells.
They worked for years, and gave thanks to the strict
protectionlate, but good enoughthat saved one
related species. At last, a Hawaiian monk seal had given
birth to a genetically-pure Caribbean monk seal, twin to a
seal long dead. And now there were five hundred, some young,
some middle-aged, with decent genetic diversity and five
years' experience living in the confines of a coastal
Today, with raucous voices, they are moving out into the
world to reclaim their ecological niche. As Tracy watches,
she thinks of the voices that will never be heard again: of
the species, known and unknown, that left not a even a bloody
scrap to be cherished and restored. Thousands (millions?) of
species had simply been brushed into extinction as habitats
were destroyed by farming and logging. People knewfor years
they had knownthat freezing or drying would save genes.
And they knew of the ecological destruction, and they knew
they weren't stopping it. And the ignorant bastards didn't
even keep samples.
Tracy discovers that she, too, cries at Restoration Day
People will surely push biomedical applications of
nanotechnology far and fast for human health-care. With a bit
more pushing, this technology base will be good enough to restore
some species now thought lost forever, to repair some of the
damage human beings have done to the web of life. It would be
better to preserve ecosystems and species intact, but
restoration, even of a few species, will be far better than
nothing. Some samples from endangered species are being kept
today, but not enough, and mostly for the wrong reasons. Chapter 9 will take a closer look at
ecosystem restoration, and what future prospects mean for action
Scenario: An Unstable Arms Race
Disputes over technology development and trade had soured
relationships between Singapore and the Japan-United States
alliance. Diplomatic inquiries regarding peculiar seismic and
sonar readings in the South China Sea had just begun when
they suddenly became irrelevant: an estimated one billion
tons of unfamiliar, highly-automated military hardware
appeared in coastal waters around the world. Accusations
began to fly between Congress and PeaceWatch personnel:
"If you'd done your jobs" "If you'd let
us do our jobs"
And so, in late February, Singapore emerged as a military
Low cost, high quality, high-speed production can be applied
to many purposes, not all attractive. Nanotechnology has enormous
potential for abuse.
Molecules matter because matter is made of molecules, and
everything from air to flesh to spacecraft is made of matter.
When we learn how to arrange molecules in new ways, we can make
new things, and make old things in new ways. Perhaps this is why
Japan's MITI has identified "control technologies for the
precision arrangement of molecules" as a basic industrial
technology for the twenty-first century. Molecular nanotechnology
will give thorough control of matter on a large scale at low
cost, shattering a whole set of technological and economic
barriers more or less at one stroke.
A molecule is an object consisting of a collection of atoms
held together by strong bonds (one-atom molecules are a special
case). "Molecule" usually refers to an object with a
number of atoms small enough to be counted (a few to a few
thousand), but strictly speaking a truck tire (for instance) is
mostly one big molecule, containing something like
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Counting this many
atoms aloud would take about 10,000,000,000 billion years.
Scientists and engineers still have no direct, convenient way
to control molecules, basically because human hands are about 10
million times too large. Today, chemists and materials scientists
make molecular structures indirectly, by mixing, heating, and the
like. The idea of nanotechnology begins with the idea of a molecular
a device resembling an industrial robot arm but built on a
microscopic scale. A general-purpose molecular assembler will be
a jointed mechanism built from rigid molecular parts, driven by
motors, controlled by computers, and able to grasp and apply
molecular-scale tools. Molecular assemblers can be used to build
other molecular machinesthey can even build more molecular
assemblers. Assemblers and other machines in molecular
manufacturing systems will be able to make almost anything, if
given the right raw materials. In effect, molecular assemblers
will provide the microscopic "hands" that we lack
today. (Chemists are asked to forgive this literary license; the
specific details of molecular binding and bonding don't change
Nanotechnology will give better control of molecular building
blocks, of how they move and go together to form more complex
objects. Molecular manufacturing will make things by building
from the bottom up, starting with the smallest possible building
blocks. The nano in nanotechnology comes from nanos,
the Greek word for dwarf. In science, the prefix nano- means one-billionth
of something, as in nanometer and nanosecond, which are typical
units of size and time in the world of molecular manufacturing.
When you see it tacked onto the name of an object, it means that
the object is made by patterning matter with molecular control: nanomachine, nanomotor, nanocomputer. These are the
smallest, most precise devices that make sense based on today's
(Be cautious of other usages, thoughsome researchers
have begun to use the nano- prefix to refer to other
small-scale technologies in the laboratory today. In this book nanotechnology
means the precise, molecular nanotechnology of the future.
British usage also applies the term to the small-scale and high
precision technologies of todayeven to precision grinding
and measurement. The latter are useful, but hardly
Digital electronics brought an information-processing
revolution by handling information quickly and controllably in
perfect, discrete pieces: bits and bytes. Likewise,
nanotechnology will bring a matter-processing revolution by
handling matter quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete
pieces: atoms and molecules. The digital revolution has centered
on a device able to make any desired pattern of bits: the
programmable computer. Likewise, the nanotechnological revolution
will center on a device able to make (almost) any desired pattern
of atoms: the programmable assembler. The technologies that
plague us today suffer from the messiness and wear of an old
phonograph record. Nanotechnology, in contrast, will bring the
crisp, digital perfection of a compact disc.
A Road Map
The next two sections say a bit more about why nanotechnology
is already worth your attention and about whether it's possible
to understand anything about the future. Later chapters answer
questions like the following:
Who is working on nanotechnology? What are they doing,
How can this work come together to provide breakthrough
capabilities? When might this happen? What developments
should we watch for?
How will nanotechnology work? Who will be able to use it?
What will it mean for the economy? For medicine? For the
What are its risks? What basic regulations will we need?
What will it mean for the global arms race?
What might go wrong as this technology emerges, and what
can we do about it?
In a democratic society, only a few people need an in-depth
understanding of how a technology works, but many people need to
understand what it can do. In the next chapter, we'll lead off by
describing the molecular world and how it worksafter all,
everything around us and inside us is made of moleculesbut
the main story is about what this technology will mean for human
beings and the biosphere.
Why Talk About It?
It is these concernsthe implications of nanotechnology
for our lives, the environment, and the futurethat guided
the writing of this book. Nanotechnology can bring great
achievements and solve great problems, but it will likewise
present opportunities for enormous abuse. Research progress is
necessary, but so is an informed and cautious public.
Our motivation in presenting these ideas is as much a fear of
potential harm, and a wish to avoid it, as a longing for the
potential good and a wish to seek it. Even so, we will dwell on
the good that nanotechnology can bring and give only an outline
of the obvious potential harm. The coming revolution can best be
managed by people who share not only a picture of what they wish
to avoid, but of what they can achieve. If we as a society have a
clear view of a route to follow, we won't need a precise catalog
of every cliff and mine field to the side of the road.
Some will hear this emphasis and call us optimistic. But would
it really be wise to dwell on exactly how a technology can be
abused? Or to draw up blueprints, perhaps?
Still, sitting here, preparing to tell this story, is an
uncomfortable place for a researcher to be. In his book How
Superstition Won and Science Lost, historian John C. Burnham
tells of the century-long retreat of scientists from what they
once saw as their responsibility: presenting the content and
methods of science to a broad audience, for the public good.
Today, the culture of science takes a dim view of
"popularization." If you can write in plain English,
this is taken as evidence that you can't do math, and vice versa.
Robert Pool, a member of the news staff of the most prestigious
American scientific journal, Science, acknowledges this
negative attitude in writing that "some researchers, either
by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time,
make it into the public eye." So how can a researcher keep
out of trouble? If you stumble on something important, wrap it in
jargon. If people realize that it's important, run and hide.
Robert Pool gently urges scientists to become more involved, but
the social pressures in the research community are heavily in the
In response to this negative attitude toward
"popularization," we can only ask that scientists and
engineers try to act in a thoroughly professional fashion when
judging a given proposalwhich is to say, that they pay
scrupulous attention to the scientific and technical facts. This
means judging the validity of technical ideas based on their
factual merits, and not on their (occasionally readable) style of
presentation, or on the emotional response they may stir up.
Nanotechnology matters to people, and they deserve to know about
its flesh-and-blood human consequences, its impact on society and
nature. We urge scientifically inclined readers to consult the Technical Bibliography at the end of the
book, and then to point out any major errors they can find in the
technical papers on this topic. We urge nonscientists who
encounter scientifically knowledgeable critics to ask for specific,
technical criticisms. We'll discuss some of the criticisms
made to date in Chapter 3. Years of
discussion with scientists and engineersin public, in
private, at conferences, and through the pressindicate that
the case for nanotechnology is solid. Japanese and European
industry, government, and academic researchers are forging ahead
on the road to nanotechnology, and more and more U.S. research is
applicable. Some researchers have even begun to call it an
Words that Block Thinking
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and
technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the
future. Language seems to have something to do with it.
If something sounds futurelike, we call it
"futuristic." If that doesn't stop the conversation, we
say that it "sounds like science fiction." These
descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like
rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the
like. Of course, all these became real in the 1960s, because the
science wasn't fiction. Today, we can see not only how to
build additional science-fictional devices, butmore
important, for better or worsehow to make them cheap and
abundant. We need to think about the future, and name-calling
A serious problem. (Calvin and Hobbes.
Copyright (R) 1989 by Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinting
with permission. All rights reserved)
Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging
word for "futurelike." Ideas for future technologies
may be termed mirai no ("of the future," a hope
or a goal), shõrai-teki (an expected development, which
might be twenty years away), or kûsõ no
("imaginary" only, because contrary to physical law or
economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai
no and shõrai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kûsõ
no, like antigravity boots.
A final objection is the claim that there's no point in trying
to think about the future, because it is all too complex and
unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little
truth. It deserves a considered response.
The Difficulty of Looking Forward
If our future will include nanotechnology, then it would be
useful to understand what it can do, so that we can make more
sensible plans for our families, careers, companies, and society.
But many intelligent people will respond that understanding is
impossible, that the future is just too unpredictable. This
depends, of course, on what you're trying to predict:
The weather a month from now? Forget it; weather is too
The position of the Moon a century from now? Easy; the Moon's
orbit is like clockwork.
Which personal-computer company will lead twenty years from
now? Good luck; major companies today didn't even exist twenty
That personal computers will become enormously more powerful?
A virtual certainty.
And so on. If you aim to say something sensible about the
future of technology, the trick is to ask the right questions and
to avoid the standard pitfalls. In his book Megamistakes:
Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change,
Steven Schnaars surveys these pitfalls and their effects on past
predictions. Borrowing and adapting some of his generalizations,
here are our suggestions for how to blunder into a Megamistake in
Ignore the scientific facts, or guess.
Forget to ask whether anyone wants the projected product
Ignore the costs.
Try to predict which company or technology will win.
In looking at what to expect from nanotechnologyor any
technologyall of these must be avoided, since they can lead
to some grand absurdities. In a classic demonstration of the
first error, someone once concocted the notion that pills would
someday replace food. But people need energy to live, and energy
means calories, which means fuel, which takes up room. To subsist
on pills, you'd need to gobble them by the fistful. This would be
like eating a tasteless kibbled dog food, which was hardly the
idea. In short, the pills-for-food prediction ignored the
scientific facts. In a similar vein, we once heard promises of a
cure for cancerbut this was based on a guess about
scientific facts, a guess that "cancer" was in some
sense a single disease, which might have a single point of
vulnerability and a single cure. This guess was wrong, and
progress against cancer has been slow.
Earlier, we presented a scenario that includes the routine
cure of a cancer using nanotechnology. This scenario takes
account of the currently known facts: Cancers differ, but each
kind can be recognized by its molecular markers. Molecular
machines can recognize molecular markers, and so can be primed to
recognize and destroy specific kinds of cancer cells as they turn
up. We will explore medical applications of nanotechnology
further in Chapter 10.
Even nanotechnology can't cram a meal into a pill, but this is
just as well. The pills-for-food proposal didn't just ignore the
facts, it also ignored what people wantthings like
dinner conversation and novel ethnic cuisines. Magazines once
promised cities beneath the sea, but who wants to live in the
ultimate damp, chilly climate? California and the Sunbelt have
somehow proved more popular. And again, we were promised talking
cars, but after giving them a try, people prefer luxury cars from
companies that promise silence.
Many human wants are easy to predict, because they are old and
stable: People want better medical care, housing, consumer goods,
transportation, education, and so forth, preferably at lower
costs, with greater safety, in a cleaner environment. When our
limited abilities force us to choose better quality or
lower cost or greater safety or a cleaner
environment, decisions become sticky. Molecular manufacturing
will allow a big step in the direction of better quality and
lower costs and increased safety and a cleaner
environment. (Choices of how much of each will remain.)
There is no existing market demand for
"nanotechnology," as such, but a great demand for what
it can do.
Neglecting costs has also been popular among prognosticators:
Building cities under the sea would be expensive, with few
benefits. Building in space has more benefits, but would be far
more expensive, using past or present technologies. Many bold
projections gather dust on shelves because development or
manufacturing costs are too high. Some examples include personal
robots, flying cars, and Moon coloniesthey still sound more
like 1950s science fiction than practical possibilities, and cost
is one major reason.
Molecular manufacturing is, in part, about cost reduction. As
mentioned above, molecular machines in nature make things
cheaply, like wood, potatoes, and hay. Trees are more complex
than spacecraft, so why should spacecraft stay more expensive?
Gordon Tullock, professor of economics and political science at
the University of Arizona, says of molecular nanotechnology,
"Its economic effect is that we will all be much
richer." The prospect of building sophisticated products for
the price of potatoes gives reason to pull a lot of old
projections down from the shelf. We hope you won't mind the dust
when we brush them off for a fresh look.
Even staying within the bounds of known science, focusing on
things people want, and paying attention to costs, it's still
hard to pick a specific winner. Technology development is like a
horse race: everyone knows that some horse will win, but knowing which
horse is harder (and worth big bucks). Both corporate managers
betting money and researchers betting their careers have to play
this game, and they often lose. A technology may work, provide
something useful, and be less expensive than last year's
alternative, yet still be clobbered in the market by something
unexpected but better. To know which technologies will win, you'd
have to know all the alternatives, whether they've been
invented yet or not. Good luck!
We won't try to play that game here.
"Nanotechnology" (like "modern industry")
describes a huge range of technologies. Nonetheless,
nanotechnology in one form or another is a monumentally obvious
idea: it will be the culmination of an age-old trend toward more
thorough control of the structure of matter. Predicting that some
form of nanotechnology will win most technology races is like
predicting that some horse will win a horse race (as opposed to,
say, a dachshund). A technology based on thorough control of the
structure of matter will almost always beat one based on crude
control of the structure of matter. Other technologies have
already won races in the literal sense of being first.
Few, however, will win in the sense of being best.
Studies of nanotechnology are today in the exploratory
engineering phase, and just beginning to move into
engineering development. The basic idea of exploratory
engineering is simple: combine engineering principles with known
scientific facts to form a picture of future technological
possibilities. Exploratory engineering looks at future
possibilities to help guide our attention in the present.
Scienceespecially molecular sciencehas moved fast in
recent decades. There is no need to wait for more scientific
breakthroughs in order to make engineering breakthroughs in
EXPLORATORY ENGINEERING VENN DIAGRAM
The outer tagged rectangle represents the set of all
technologies permitted by the laws of nature, whether they
exist or not, whether they have been imagined or not. Within
this set are those technologies that are manufacturable with
today's technology, and those that are understandable with
today's science. Textbooks teach what is understandable
(hence teachable) and manufacturable (hence immediately
practical). Practical engineers achieve many successes by
cut-and-try methods and put them into production. Exploratory
engineers study what will become practical as manufacturing
abilities expand to embrace more of the possible.
The above illustration shows how exploratory engineering
relates to more familiar kinds of engineering. Each works within
the limits of the possible, which are set by the known and
unknown laws of nature. The most familiar kind is the engineering
taught in schools: this "textbook engineering" covers
technologies that can be both understood (so they can be
taught) and manufactured (so they can be used).
Bridge-building and gearbox design fall in this category. Other
technologies, however, can be manufactured but aren't
understoodany engineer can give examples of things that
work when similar things don't, and for no obvious reason. But as
long as they do work, and work consistently, they can be used
with confidence. This is the world of "cut-and-try
engineering," so important to modern industry. Bearing
lubrication, adhesives, and many manufacturing technologies
advance by cut-and-try methods.
Exploratory engineering covers technologies that can be
understood but not manufacturedyet. Technologies in
this category are also familiar to engineers, although normally
they design such things only for fun. So much is known about
mechanics, thermodynamics, electronics, and so forth that
engineers can often calculate what something will do, just from a
description of it. Yet there is no reason why everything that can
be correctly described must be manufacturablethe
constraints are different. Exploratory engineering is as simple
as textbook engineering, but neither military planners nor
corporate executives see much profit in it, so it hasn't received
The concepts of molecular manufacturing and molecular
nanotechnology are straightforward results of
exploratory-engineering research applied to molecular systems. As
we observed above, the basic ideas could have been worked out
forty years ago, if anyone had bothered. Naturally enough, both
scientists and engineers were preoccupied with more immediate
concerns. But now, with the threshold of nanotechnology
approaching, attention is beginning to focus on where the next
Nanotechnology seems to be where the world is headed if technology keeps advancing, and competition practically guarantees that advances will continue. It will open both a huge range of opportunities for benefit and a huge range of opportunities for misuse. We will paint scenarios to give a sense of the prospects and possibilities, but we don't offer predictions of what will happen. Actual human choices and blunders will depend on a range of factors and alternatives beyond what we can hope to anticipate.