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The Evolution of Nanomachinery

Posted by michael on from the grey-ooze dept.

csy writes: "Harvard's George Whitesides has a wonderful article on Nanomachinery in this month's issue of Scientific American. He casts doubts on the Drexlerian vision of mechanical assemblers, and argues that biology and chemistry, rather than mechanical engineering point to the answers in the quest for nanomachines."

4 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. does makes sense by boaworm · · Score: 3, Insightful
    One of the things you often hear when talking about open-source software is "dont reinvent the wheel", ie dont do anything which is already done. Late research has found these stem cells, and if we can use them to manipulate the human body, why try to build some nanorobot in metal ? It is already there, we just have to find out exactly how it works.


    The possibilities, if we just can figure them out, are enormous. You can create any kind of human cell out of those, the genetic code is all in there.



    Bio-informatics is probably just in the very beginning of something huge. Once we gain full understanding of the human body we have the code to life itself. It sure is a thrilling thought :-)

    --
    Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
    Aristotele
  2. It's not a zero sum game is it? by ahfoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's room for lots of approaches, I'm sure.
    I felt the author was a bit disingenuous with this quote:
    "A little submarine that was to be a hunter-killer for cancer cells would have to carry on board a little diagnostic laboratory, and because that laboratory would require sampling devices and reagents and reaction chambers and analytical devices, it would cease to be little."
    This is clearly a mix of humor and a rhetorical stab at the nanotech research community. That's fine for a popular magazine like SciAm, but it's not a serious analytical point. We'd be kidding ourselves to pretend that the only possible techniques for identifying cancer cells when parked before them on the nanoscale would require lab reagents and little miniature lab assistants in white coats drawn by Gary Larson.
    Of course SciAm has always been a popular publication masquerading as a scholarly journal and evocative claims have long been the stock in trade.
    Good one, I guess.

  3. The Drexlerian Vision of Nanotech is WET Nanotech by Sharadin · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This article is just plain wrong. The Drexlerian vision is based on Wet Nanotechnology (meaning biology and chemistry). Eric Drexler is very much against the notion of Dry Nanotechnology - in fact, most of his blueprints for 'nanoparts' are based on proteins.

    What is it with all these morons at the universities trying so hard to discredit Drexler? Are they jealous that they didn't think of it first? It sounds like it.

  4. Some Basic Rules by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nanomachines as scaled down miniatures of human scale machines is clearly very unlikely to materialize, for exactly the same scaling reasons that prevent us from having human size single cell organisms. Fundamental relationships between mass, surface area and linear dimensions are inescapable. These relationships govern the nature of physical structures of all sizes. Clearly at nanoscale the balance has shifted from a dominance of bulk properties to surface properties that are primarily chemical in nature. Anyone trying to translate an instrumentaility to nanoscale from human scale will fail miserably if they fail to account for the basic physics of scale.

    Innovative nanomachines that make use of atomic scale forces are another thing altogether. As Whitesides correctly points out, this is the realm of chemistry and biology, not the mechanics of bulk materials.