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The Nanotechnology Revolution 

Adam Keiper

T
he English chemist John Dalton first proposed the scientific theory of the atom two hundred
years ago. Since then we have seen chemists come to understand the elements and their
interactions, we have seen engineers make and use new materials to improve our lives, we have
seen physicists demonstrate that even atoms are divisible, and we have seen warriors unleash the power
of the atomic nucleus. In these two centuries we have amassed an enormous understanding of — and
wielded an increasing control over — the fundamental units of matter.

Today, in the young field of nanotechnology, scientists and engineers are taking control of atoms and
molecules individually, manipulating them and putting them to use with an extraordinary degree of
precision. Word of the promise of nanotechnology is spreading rapidly, and the air is thick with news of
nanotech breakthroughs. Governments and businesses are investing billions of dollars in nanotechnology
R&D, and political alliances and battle lines are starting to form. Public awareness of nanotech is
clearly on the rise, too, partly because references to it are becoming more common in popular culture
— with mentions in movies (like The Hulk and The Tuxedo), books (including last year’s Michael Crichton
bestseller, Prey), video games (such as the “Metal Gear Solid” series), and television (most notably in
various incarnations of Star Trek).

Yet there remains a great deal of confusion about just what nanotechnology is, both among the ordinary
people whose lives will be changed by the new science, and among the policymakers who wittingly or
unwittingly will help steer its course. Unsurprisingly, some of the confusion is actually caused by the
increased attention — sensationalistic reporting and creative license have done little to prepare society
for the hard decisions that the development of nanotechnology will make necessary.

Much of the confusion, however, comes from the scientists and engineers themselves, because they
apply the name “nanotechnology” to two different things — that is, to two distinct but related fields of
research, one with the potential to improve today’s world, the other with the potential to utterly

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remake or even destroy it. The meaning that

nanotechnology holds for our future depends on which
definition of the word “nanotechnology” pans out. Thus any
understanding of the implications of nanotechnology must
begin by sorting out its history and its strange dual meaning. Follow The New Atlantis

Mainstream Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology got going in the second half of the twentieth century, although a few scientists had
done related work earlier. For instance, as part of an 1871 thought experiment, the Scottish physicist
James Clerk Maxwell imagined extremely tiny “demons” that could redirect atoms one at a time. And
M.I.T. professor Arthur Robert von Hippel (born in 1898 and still alive today) became interested in
molecular design as early as the 1930s; he coined the term “molecular engineering” in the 1960s. [Dr.
Hippel passed away a few months after this article was published.]

Usually, though, the credit for inspiring nanotechnology goes to a lecture by Richard Phillips Feynman, a
brilliant Caltech physicist who later won a Nobel Prize for “fundamental work in quantum
electrodynamics.” He is best remembered today for his clear and quirky classroom lectures and for his
critical role on the presidential commission that investigated the Challenger accident. On the evening
of December 29, 1959, Feynman delivered an after-dinner lecture at the annual meeting of the
American Physical Society; in that talk, called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Feynman
proposed work in a field “in which little has been done, but in which an enormous amount can be done
in principle.”

“What I want to talk about,” Feynman said, “is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a
small scale. As soon as I mention this, people tell me about miniaturization, and how far it has
progressed today ... But that’s nothing; that’s the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend
to discuss.”

Feynman described how the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica could be written on the head of a pin, and
how all the world’s books could fit in a pamphlet. Such remarkable reductions could be done as “a
simple reproduction of the original pictures, engravings, and everything else on a small scale without
loss of resolution.” Yet it was possible to get smaller still: if you converted all the world’s books into an
efficient computer code instead of just reduced pictures, you could store “all the information that man
has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world ... in a cube of material one two-hundredth of
an inch wide — which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is
plenty of room at the bottom! Don’t tell me about microfilm!” He boldly declared that “the principles
of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom”
— in fact, Feynman saw atomic manipulation as inevitable, “a development which I think cannot be
avoided.”

In his lecture, Feynman pointed out several avenues for research that would later come to define
nanotechnology, such as making computers much smaller and therefore faster, and making “mechanical
surgeons” that could travel to trouble spots inside the body. Feynman admitted that he didn’t have a

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clear conception of how such tiny machines might be used or created, but to help get things going, he
offered two prizes: $1,000 to the first person to make a working electric motor that was no bigger than
one sixty-fourth of an inch on any side, and another $1,000 to the first person to shrink a page of text to
1/25,000 its size — the dimension necessary to fit the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin.
(He awarded the former prize in 1960, the latter in 1985.)

Although Feynman’s lecture is, in retrospect, remembered as a major event, it didn’t make much of a
splash in the world of science at the time. Research in the direction he suggested didn’t begin
immediately, and nanotechnology was slow to take off. Feynman himself didn’t use the word
“nanotechnology” in his lecture; in fact, the word didn’t exist until 15 years later, when Norio
Taniguchi of the Tokyo University of Science suggested it to describe technology that strives for
precision at the level of about one nanometer.

A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. The prefix “nano-” comes from the Greek word nanos, meaning
dwarf. (Scientists originally used the prefix just to indicate “very small,” as in “nanoplankton,” but it
now means one-billionth, just as “milli-” means one-thousandth, and “micro-” means one-millionth.) If
a nanometer were somehow magnified to appear as long as the nose on your face, then a red blood cell
would appear the size of the Empire State Building, a human hair would be about two or three miles
wide, one of your fingers would span the continental United States, and a normal person would be
about as tall as six or seven planet Earths piled atop one another.

In 1981, scientists gained a sophisticated new tool powerful enough to allow them to see single atoms
with unprecedented clarity. This device, the scanning tunneling microscope, uses a tiny electric current
and a very fine needle to detect the height of individual atoms. The images taken with these
microscopes look like tumulose alien landscapes — and researchers learned how to rearrange those
landscapes, once they discovered that the scanning tunneling microscope could also be used to pick up,
move, and precisely place atoms, one at a time. The first dramatic demonstration of this power came in
1990 when a team of IBM physicists revealed that they had, the year before, spelled out the letters
“IBM” using 35 individual atoms of xenon. In 1991, the same research team built an “atomic switch,” an
important step in the development of nanoscale computing.

Another breakthrough came with the discovery of new shapes for molecules of carbon, the
quintessential element of life. In 1985, researchers reported the discovery of the “buckyball,” a lovely
round molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms. This led in turn to the 1991 discovery of a related
molecular shape known as the “carbon nanotube”; these nanotubes are about 100 times stronger than
steel but just a sixth of the weight, and they have unusual heat and conductivity characteristics that
guarantee they will be important to high technology in the coming years.

But these exciting discoveries are the exception rather than the rule: most of what passes for
nanotechnology nowadays is really just materials science. Mainstream nanotechnology, as practiced by
hundreds of companies, is merely the intellectual offspring of conventional chemical engineering and
our new nanoscale powers. The basis of most research in mainstream nanotech is the fact that some
materials have peculiar or useful properties when pulverized into nanoscale particles or otherwise

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rearranged.

Seen this way, mainstream nanotechnology isn’t truly new; we’ve been unwitting nanotechnologists for
centuries. One official from the National Science Foundation told Congress that photography, of all
things, is a subset of nanotechnology — and a “relatively old” one at that! But if the term
“nanotechnology” is to be used that loosely, why not reach much further back into history? Renaissance
artists used paints and glazes that got their appealing color and iridescence from nanoparticles. The
ancients, too, found uses for nanoparticles of soot. On and on it goes, back through the ages.

A great many of today’s mainstream nanotechnologists are simply following in that tradition, using
modern techniques to make tiny particles and then finding uses for them. Among the products that now
incorporate nanoparticles are: some new paints and sunscreens, certain lines of stain- and water-
repellent clothing, a few kinds of anti-reflective and anti-fogging glass, and some tennis equipment.
Cosmetics companies are starting to use nanoparticles in their products, and pharmaceuticals
companies are researching ways to improve drug delivery through nanotech. Within a few years,
nanotechnology will most likely be available in self-cleaning windows and flat-screen TVs.
Improvements in computing, energy, and medical diagnosis and treatment are likely as well.

In short, mainstream nanotechnology is an interesting field, with some impressive possibilities for
improving our lives with better materials and tools. But that’s just half the story: there’s another side
to nanotechnology, one that promises much more extreme, and perhaps dangerous, changes.

Molecular Manufacturing
This more radical form of nanotechnology originated in the mind of an M.I.T. undergraduate in the
mid-1970s. Kim Eric Drexler was specializing in theories of space travel and space colonization in
college when he first thought of using DNA to make computers. But why stop there? He soon realized
that the biological “machinery” already responsible for the full diversity of life on Earth could be
adapted to build nonliving products upon command. Molecule-sized machines, originally derived from
those found in nature, could be used to manufacture just about anything man wished. Anything.

Drexler, who began to develop these theories before he’d heard of Feynman’s lecture, first published
his ideas in a 1981 journal article. Five years later, he brought the notion of molecular manufacturing to
the general public with his book Engines of Creation. An astonishingly original work of futurism, Engines
presented Drexler’s nanotech theories and pointed out how nanotechnology would revolutionize other
areas of science and technology — leading to breakthroughs in medicine, artificial intelligence, and the
conquest of space.

At the heart of Drexler’s vision for molecular manufacturing was a kind of nanomachine called an
“assembler,” which can “place atoms in almost any reasonable arrangement,” thus allowing us to “build
almost anything that the laws of nature allow to exist.” It would take millions and millions of
assemblers to make a product big enough for us to use — so in order for molecular manufacturing to
work, assemblers must be capable of replicating themselves; as each “generation” of assemblers
replicated itself, the overall number of assemblers would grow exponentially.

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In one of the most striking passages of Drexler’s book, he describes how molecular manufacturing could
be used to build — to grow, really — a large rocket engine. Replicating assemblers would be pumped
into a vat, and all the plans for the rocket engine would be stored on a single “seed.” With the addition
of fuel for the assemblers and raw materials for the construction, the engine would be completed in
“less than a day” and would require “almost no human attention.” The final product would be “a
seamless thing, gemlike,” light and strong — instead of a clunky, “massive piece of welded and bolted
metal.” If you wanted, you could “exploit nanotechnology more deeply” by building engines that repair
themselves, or that “take different shapes under different operating conditions.”

Drexler further imagined how nanotechnology could completely reshape everyday life. “It should be no
great trick, for example, to make everything from dishes to carpets self-cleaning, and household air
permanently fresh.” Fresh food — “genuine meat, grain, vegetables, and so forth” — could be produced
in the home. Suits made with nanotechnology could be used for virtual reality, simulating “most of the
sights and sensations of an entire environment.” And nanotechnology could make “some form” of
telepathy “as possible as telephony.”

Such powers seem like magic, a comparison that Drexler acknowledged: nanotechnology, he wrote,
could make possible a device that “might aptly be called a ‘genie machine.’” In a later book, he
described in general terms how such a machine might be designed. Other writers, following in Drexler’s
footsteps, have imagined other grant-any-wish tools — like “utility fog,” a theoretical swarm of tiny
robots that could “simulate the physical existence of almost any object” and can thus “act as shelter,
clothing, telephone, computer, and automobile.” As envisioned by John Storrs Hall, the techie who
dreamed the stuff up, the utility fog “that was your clothing becomes your bath water and then your
bed” [J. Storrs Hall, “Utility Fog: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of,” in Nanotechnology: Molecular
Speculations on Global Abundance, B.C. Crandall, ed.].

Clearly, the Drexlerian notion of nanotechnology differs vastly from the nanotech products of today.
Compare, for instance, how the two divergent visions of nanotechnology would differently affect one
small aspect of human life: cosmetics. Mainstream nanotechnology will soon be used by cosmetics
companies to help their current products — makeup, lotions, sunscreen, and so forth — last longer and
work better. But if Drexler’s version of nanotechnology were to come to fruition, the beauty industry
would be revolutionized: nanomachines could precisely adjust your hair and skin color to your liking;
wrinkles could be smoothed and excess fat removed; one writer suggests it would even

become possible to mold the face and body to whatever shape might be desired. Each
person who cared to could achieve his or her own ideal of physical perfection or, for
that matter, whatever frightening or gruesome effect they wanted. Many who never
liked their own youthful appearance will opt instead to copy some popular model or
other sex symbol. It could become very confusing, with dozens of pop-idol look-alikes
crowding the parks and boulevards of our future metropolis. Some may not relish the
prospect, but we may never see the last of the Elvis clones. [Source: Richard Crawford,
“Cosmetic Nanosurgery,” in Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global
Abundance, B.C. Crandall, ed.]

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So while mainstream nanotech gives you better eyeshadow, Drexler’s nanotech gives you a whole new
face — yet these two technologies of profoundly different potential share one name. “If research on
waterproof fabric coatings is ‘nanotechnology,’ then the term has become almost meaningless,” Drexler
told Wired News in June. Drexler himself now talks about his kind of nanotech as “molecular
nanotechnology” and “molecular manufacturing.” Other names have been suggested, too: one observer
has argued that Drexler should start using the ugly word “mechutechnology.” But for most people, one
umbrella term describes both the mainstream approach and Drexler’s more radical vision.

But is Drexler’s nanotechnology realistically possible? Will we truly be able to watch houses build
themselves from the ground up, to transform garbage into steak, to populate the world with Elvis look-
alikes? Drexler’s book Engines of Creation is an extraordinary exercise in prolepsis: he meticulously
refutes every technical objection he can anticipate. Will thermal vibrations make his molecular
machines impossible? (No.) What about radiation? (No.) Quantum uncertainty? (No!) To shore up his
technical arguments for the feasibility of his vision, he further expanded on his ideas in the world’s first
nanotechnology textbook. Nanosystems (1992), a dense volume that grew out of a class he taught at
Stanford, is crammed with equations and diagrams and designs for molecular machines, and it has gone
far to put Drexler’s nanotechnology on sound technical footing.

To date, no scientist or engineer has been able to make a rock-solid argument showing the impossibility
of molecular manufacturing as Drexler envisions it. A few critics have challenged Drexler on technical
points, most prominently Richard Errett Smalley, the Rice University chemist who won a Nobel Prize for
discovering the new class of carbon molecules that includes buckyballs and carbon nanotubes. In 1999,
in written testimony to a congressional subcommittee, Smalley claimed that Drexler’s version of
nanotechnology is “just a dream” and “will always remain a fantasy” because “there are simple facts of
nature that prevent it from ever becoming a reality.” [Testimony available in PDF format here.]

When these claims were repeated in a 2001 article in Scientific American [in PDF here] and again in
public this year, Drexler and his allies responded with strongly worded public letters [1, 2, 3, 4],
accusing Smalley of basing his challenge on a straw man. Without getting into the technical details of
the dispute, the essence of Drexler’s response is devastating: If “atomically precise structures” are
“fundamentally unfeasible, then so is life” itself, he wrote. Since enzymes and ribosomes and other
molecular “machines” work in nature, man-made molecular machines should work, too.

Drexler and his supporters have made short shrift of other critics as well. Yet if no one has mounted a
serious and sustained challenge to demonstrate a fatal flaw, or even a major error, in Drexler’s vision of
nanotechnology, why is it so often disparaged by those involved in mainstream nanotech? Molecular
manufacturing has been called pseudoscience, science fiction, and unrealistic utopianism, and Eric
Drexler himself has suffered repeated ad hominem attacks.

One reason for the animosity of the mainstreamers is their fear that Drexler’s talk of the great boon and
bane of nanotechnology will cast a pall over their own modest research — giving nanotech a reputation
for being fantastical or hazardous.

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A second explanation for why mainstream nanotech experts pooh-pooh Drexler is that they simply don’t
know what they’re talking about. Drexler’s kind of nanotechnology is so newfangled that it doesn’t fit
neatly into any single division of modern science or technology. (That fact actually caused difficulties
when Drexler tried to obtain his Ph.D. at M.I.T.; he was eventually awarded an interdisciplinary degree
— the world’s first doctorate in nanotechnology.) It’s difficult to find “appropriate critiques of
nanotechnology designs,” Drexler wrote in a 2001 article in Scientific American, since “many
researchers whose work seems relevant are actually the wrong experts — they are excellent in their
discipline but have little expertise in systems engineering. The shortage of molecular systems engineers
will probably be a limiting factor in the speed with which nanotechnology can be developed.”

No doubt some of the criticism of Drexler’s nanotechnology is rooted in this important fact: nobody
knows how to make the key component of his molecular manufacturing system, the assembler. Although
Drexler and his supporters have come up with lots of designs for molecular machines and plans for how
they would function, there still isn’t any way to make them real. When someone figures out how to
make the miniscule workhorses of molecular manufacturing — the critical moment of discovery that
Drexler calls “the assembler breakthrough” — the rest may quickly fall into place, and the world could
be transformed abruptly and forever.

Nanomedicine
Some people find Eric Drexler’s vision of the nanotech future so compelling that they embrace it with
religious fervor. This is not a new observation; a 1989 Economist article about Drexler spoke of his
“gospel of nanotechnology” [“The Invisible Factory,” The Economist, December 9, 1989]. The 1995 book
Nano by Ed Regis includes an entire chapter called “Brother Eric’s Nanotech Revival,” describing the
sense of awe that Drexler’s lectures would inspire in members of the audience: “There was a veiled
feeling of being one of the Elect, the Select, the Knowledgeable, the Chosen.”

A half-century ago, philosopher and technology critic Jacques Ellul argued that the rise of technology
leads to the decline of traditional spirituality, as man transfers “his sense of the sacred ... to technique
itself.” We develop a “worship of technique,” Ellul said, and we associate our technology with a
“feeling of the sacred.” Drexler’s nanotechnology is perfectly suited to arouse religious enthusiasm. It
involves incredible, invisible powers. The all-important “assembler breakthrough” is akin to a Second
Coming or a Judgment Day. And there’s even an afterlife: cryonics.

Nanotechnology is especially appealing to those in the growing ranks of what Charles T. Rubin, in the
previous issue of this journal, usefully dubbed the “extinctionist project”: the transhumanists,
posthumanists, extropians, and others who seek to completely remake human nature. Nanotechnology is
central to their vision of a future of agelessness, immortality, and rebirth.

They place their hopes in nanomedicine, a field that would repair or improve the body from the inside
out, with a precision and delicacy far greater than that of the finest surgical instruments available
today. Science fiction envisioned tiny internal medical procedures long ago; in the 1966 movie Fantastic
Voyage, a medical staff boards an experimental submarine which is then drastically miniaturized and
injected into a patient in order to destroy a deadly blood clot. Of course, miniaturizing humans is

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preposterous, but in the 1960s it was hard to imagine any other way to make tiny machines intelligent
enough to reach and repair damage inside the body. But nanomachines are certainly small enough, and
with programmed instructions, they can be smart, too.

The world’s leading expert on nanomedicine is Robert A. Freitas, Jr., a polymath with a law degree who
worked on numerous space-related projects before becoming involved in nanotechnology. Currently
employed as a researcher at the nanotech firm Zyvex, he is one of only a handful of people who can
claim to have made major theoretical contributions to Drexlerian nanotechnology.

Freitas is currently several years into the writing of an exhaustive four-volume series called
Nanomedicine, the first technical work on the subject. In the first massive volume (published in 1999),
he offers technical speculations on how nanorobots might navigate, sense their surroundings, and move
through the body; how they might detect problems and communicate with one another; and how they
might change shape and obtain energy. The second volume of Nanomedicine, due out this year, will
examine “biocompatibility” — how nanorobots might interact with the body, especially the immune
system.

Many of the tools of nanomedicine could be used for either therapy or enhancement. Take, for
example, the “respirocyte,” an artificial red blood cell about which Freitas has theorized. Respirocytes,
capable of delivering oxygen hundreds of times more efficiently than real red blood cells, would be
invaluable in the treatment of various respiratory and cardiovascular disorders, or as a substitute for
real blood during transfusions. But they would also have “a variety of sports, veterinary, battlefield and
other applications”; they could be used to boost a mountain climber’s endurance, to help a diver hold
his breath for hours, or to enable a soldier to fight harder.

And the respirocyte is among the simplest medical nanomachines imaginable. Others might be able to
repair cells and fix damaged DNA; to remove toxins, clean out cholesterol, and eliminate scar tissue; to
destroy cancer cells and fight countless diseases. And the same nanotechnology that keeps your body
healthy can indefinitely stave off senescence. The process of aging, Drexler argued in Engines of
Creation, is “fundamentally no different from any other physical disorder,” so cell repairing
nanomachines should, in theory, be able to halt aging or reverse it. You can pick the age you want to be
— in fact, you can play mix and match: give yourself the distinguished hairline of a fifty-year-old, the
sturdy frame of a thirty-year-old, the lusty libido of a twenty-year-old, and the keen eyesight of a ten-
year-old.

Even the Grim Reaper is in for tough times: Death may already be “slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and
desperate men,” but in the age of nanotechnology, Death will increasingly obey the whims of Tom,
Dick, and Harry, too. Molecular machines will bridge the gap between living matter and nonliving
matter, making the border between life and death much fuzzier. In the age of nanotechnology, a person
might intentionally put himself into stasis, perhaps to “time travel” dreamlessly into the future, or to
wait out a centuries-long interstellar voyage. Even today, hundreds of people of sufficient means are
making plans to freeze themselves in hopes that nanotech will someday restore them; these people are
willing to shell out big bucks to cryonics companies that promise to preserve their corpses, or some

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meaningful fraction thereof, until the prospect of reanimation becomes realistic.

There are, however, some foreseeable limits to nanomedicine. While nanomachines might one day be
able to restore and maintain the body, there is no guarantee that they’ll be able to keep the mind
intact. Some brain damage can be physically fixed, but lost memories and personality — the brain’s
software (figuratively speaking) — will be irretrievable. If bits of your mind are lost, “repair machines
could no more restore them than art conservators could restore a tapestry from stirred ash,” as Drexler
has said. But of course many of those engaged in the extinctionist project have a solution in the works:
they seek to reduce the mind to software (literally) so the contents of your brain can be as
downloadable and fungible tomorrow as digital video and music are today.

How Soon?
Estimates on how long we have to wait for major breakthroughs in nanotechnology vary greatly. Robert
Freitas told one interviewer that the kind of nanomedicine he envisions is “at least 10 to 20 years
away”; in a different interview he put the number at 40 years. Another nanotech expert says molecular
manufacturing is 20 or 30 years away. We’ll have to wait at least ten years before we can ride in
“superintelligent” airplanes enhanced with nanotechnology, according to a Boeing executive. An all-
purpose nanotech entertainment system could “arrive on the scene around the year 2020,” according to
one writer [John Papiewski, “The Companion: A Very Personal Computer,” in Nanotechnology:
Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance, B.C. Crandall, ed.]. The British Ministry of Defense says
nanotech won’t hit its stride any earlier than 20 or 30 years from now, but a Canadian expert says it will
start to dramatically change our lives in the next 10 to 20 years. Ray Kurzweil, the technologist,
predicts in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines that nanotech will be used in manufacturing by 2019
— and that by 2049, smart swarms and nanotech food will be feasible [pp. 278, 280]. The U.S.
government projects that the worldwide nanotechnology market will exceed $1 trillion by 2015 [as in
this 2001 NSF report], although one group opposed to nanotechnology puts it more ominously: by 2015,
the controllers of nanotechnology “will be the ruling force in the world economy” [“The Big Down,” ETC
Group, p. 43].

While there have been a few indications of progress in nanotechnology in the past two or three years,
the present booming interest in all things “nano” is bound to quicken the pace of discovery. In the U.S.,
so many states are subsidizing nanotech research that a New York Times reporter whose job was to read
governors’ “State of the State” speeches in 2001 found herself asking: “Are there enough
nanotechnological researchers to go around?” Governments in Europe and Asia are also putting money
into nanotech, including Switzerland, Germany, Britain, China — and even Iran.

Businesses around the world are spending heavily on mainstream nanotech, pouring more than $3 billion
into nanotech R&D this year alone, according to one estimate. A recent survey showed that “13 of the
top 30 Dow component companies discuss nanotechnology on their websites.” But all the nanotech buzz
is destined to attract con artists and frauds, too. Some companies doing work completely unrelated to
nanotechnology have incorporated “nano” into their names, in hopes of getting money from gullible
investors caught up in the hype. And earlier this year, a major conference on nanotech was canceled
under mysterious circumstances; it now appears that the whole thing was a scam to get money from the

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attendees.

If anything is likely to dampen the nanotech boom, it is the prospect of regulation. In the past year,
mainstream nanotech has suddenly come under scrutiny from researchers and activists worried that
nanoparticles could endanger public health or harm the environment. So far, there has been very little
precautionary research on the safety of nanoparticles; indeed, when Rice University’s Center for
Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology conducted a survey of the scientific literature relating to
nanoparticles — “a field with more than 12,000 citations a year” — they found no documented research
on the risks of nanoparticles. Vicki L. Colvin, the Center’s director, told Congress last April that the
safety of nanoparticles should be determined through immediate and thorough tests. “From asbestos to
DDT we have, as a society, paid an enormous price for not evaluating toxicological and ecosystem
impacts before industries develop,” she said. Her organization has started investigating nanoparticle
safety, and in July the main U.S. lobbying group for the nanotechnology industry (the NanoBusiness
Alliance) announced that it, too, would start studying the health and environmental safety of
nanoparticles. Similar inquiries have begun in Britain and the European Union.

Beyond the Gray Goo

The health and environmental threats posed by mainstream nanotech are far less frightening than the
hypothetical dangers of the Drexlerian flavor of nanotech. In an infamous article in Wired magazine in
2000, technologist Bill Joy made the case for halting nano-research because of the possibility that we
might wipe out all life on Earth. Joy’s article stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy, even though the
idea had been around for a long time: the apocalypse he described was based on a theory that had first
been suggested more than a decade earlier in Engines of Creation.

For molecular manufacturing to work, Drexler’s assemblers would have to replicate themselves, just as
tiny organisms make duplicates of themselves. But what if something went wrong — what if the
replication spiraled out of control? Speed-breeding assemblers could devour all life on Earth in short
order. According to Engines of Creation, “among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology” — presumably
meaning the author and his friends — “this threat has become known as the ‘gray goo problem’”:

Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray
goo” emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a
single species of crabgrass. They might be “superior” in an evolutionary sense ... The
gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: we cannot afford certain kinds of
accidents with replicating assemblers. Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to
our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem
from a simple laboratory accident ... We must not let a single replicating assembler of
the wrong kind be loosed on an unprepared world.

In time, Drexler backed away from the gray goo scenario, reasoning that no one would design a self-
replicating assembler capable of surviving in nature. “Consider cars,” he wrote in 1990. “To work, they
require gasoline, oil, brake fluid, and so forth. No mere accident could enable a car to forage in the
wild and refuel from tree sap ... It would be likewise with simple replicators designed to work in vats of

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assembler fluid” — no right-minded engineer would create replicators that could exist in the wild.

But a terrorist might. Or an enemy nation. Biosphere-destroying self-replicators may not arise as the
result of an inadvertent scientific slip-up, but they might be designed intentionally by those seeking to
bring destruction or wreak havoc.

In the wake of Bill Joy’s screed and the gray goo frenzy it inspired, Robert Freitas, the nanomedicine
expert, wrote the first serious, technical analysis of the gray goo scenario. His paper — to which he gave
the whimsical title “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy
Recommendations” — made estimates and calculations relating to the speed of replication and the rate
of dispersal of self-replicators in the wild. If certain unlikely conditions are arranged just right, it is
theoretically possible, Freitas found, for self-replicators to destroy the planet’s entire biosphere in
under three hours — but such a high-speed attack would instantly cause a massive spike in temperature,
alerting authorities to the situation and allowing them to respond. Conversely, it is theoretically
possible for biosphere-eating self-replicators to create an almost undetectably small increase in
temperature — but then it would take them twenty months to complete their task, leaving plenty of
time to observe the destruction and organize a defense.

Instead of going through all the trouble of designing self-replicators that could eat everything, why not
design some that could make a more focused attack? “The classic example,” Freitas says, “is tire rubber
and asphalt tar binder; cars, trucks and airplanes roll on roads and tarmacs worldwide.” Imagine the
damage to the global economy if all the world’s roads became soup overnight. “Other vectors with
similar properties include cotton, polyester or other uniform textiles, insulation on electrical wiring,
and paper money.”

And though Freitas doesn’t say as much, it seems possible that self-replicating nanobots could be
designed to target and destroy a specific species. Perhaps they could be tailored to attack only humans
— or just specific groups of humans, or just a specific individual. Nanoweapons could be smarter than
conventional biological weapons, with a more precise lethality and potential to cause diseases unlike
any seen before. What’s more, nanotechnology could also be used to aid in the manufacture and
targeting of conventional bioweapons. (There has also been some recent speculation that
nanotechnology could be combined with nuclear weaponry. Analysts at the Acronym Institute for
Disarmament Diplomacy and Jane’s Chem-Bio Web have theorized that nanotechnology could play a
part in the creation of so-called “fourth-generation” nukes with small, low-yield warheads. But they
apparently confuse nanotechnology with microtechnology, and they make confusing and contradictory
assumptions about how the technologies needed to enable fourth-generation nukes will evolve.)

Aside from nanotech’s potential as a weapon of mass destruction, it could also make possible totally
novel forms of violence and oppression. Nanotechnology could theoretically be used to make mind-
control systems, invisible and mobile eavesdropping devices, or unimaginably horrific tools of torture.
Yes, it’s true that defensive applications of nanotechnology would develop alongside offensive ones, but
that hardly mitigates the potential for enormities and catastrophes.

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To save the world, Bill Joy argues that we must relinquish our pursuit of nanotech knowledge. He
recommends international treaties and a verification regime. But that would be exceedingly difficult,
since nanotechnology isn’t just a science of the small, it’s also a small science: it doesn’t require giant
equipment or big laboratories or gigantic budgets, and most of the work is conducted in small labs
distributed around the world rather than in a few centralized behemoth facilities. Scientists wishing to
hide their nanotech research programs could easily disguise them as other projects in chemistry or
physics. The allure of nanotechnology is so great that relinquishment could only work if it were
enforced through “detailed, universal policing on a totalitarian scale,” as Eric Drexler has worried, or if
some horrible nanotech-related disaster shocked the world into giving up on nano.

No callow cheerleader for the nanotech revolution, Drexler in 1986 co-founded the Foresight Institute, a
California-based nonprofit organization “formed to help prepare society for anticipated advanced
technologies,” especially nanotechnology. Among the Institute’s projects is a set of proposed “Foresight
Guidelines on Molecular Nanotechnology,” first drafted in 1999. The guidelines forbid the creation of
nanobots capable of “replication in a natural, uncontrolled environment,” and provide several other
principles for nanotechnologists. According to the Foresight website, the Guidelines “might eventually
be enforced via a variety of means, possibly including lab certifications, randomized open inspections,
professional society guidelines and peer pressure, insurance requirements and policies, stiff legal and
economic penalties for violations, and other sanctions.”

The Politics of Nanotech

So far, no nanotech businesses have adopted the Foresight Guidelines — after all, most firms are
working on mainstream nanotech, not the riskier kind. Besides, nanotech companies have no motivation
to regulate themselves, since it seems unlikely that they will be regulated by government any time
soon. But this may change as the politics of nanotechnology begin to take shape.

Some agencies in the federal government have been involved in nanotechnology since at least the early
1980s, most notably the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. By 1997, the federal government was annually
investing $116 million in nanotech; that figure had doubled by 1999.

In 2000, the Clinton Administration pushed for more subsidies for nanotech and the creation of a
National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) that would coordinate the nanotech work of six different
agencies. President Clinton alluded to nanotechnology in that January’s State of the Union Address,
when he spoke of “materials ten times stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight, and — this is
unbelievable to me — molecular computers the size of a teardrop with the power of today’s fastest
supercomputers.” His administration worked hard to sell the proposal to Congress; as one official from
the Clinton White House told Scientific American, “You need to come up with new, exciting, cutting-
edge, at-the-frontier things in order to convince the budget- and policy-making apparatus to give you
more money.”

Congress couldn’t resist, and the NNI was approved with an initial budget of $422 million. President
Bush, in the first year of his administration, asked for another hundred million dollars for nanotech, and
added another handful of agencies to the NNI. Bush’s budget proposals for FY2003 and FY2004 further

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boosted the nanotech budget — despite the flagging economy and the war on terrorism. (In fact, some
NNI proponents have used the war on terrorism to make the case for increasing nanotech funding; they
say nanotech research can help build tools to detect weapons of mass destruction.)

Flush with nanotech cash, the National Science Foundation recently started a program to teach high
school and elementary school students about nanotechnology, “with introduction to preliminary
concepts as early as kindergarten,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. “Business, industry, and
higher-education leaders agree, saying early education gives students a jump on a job market many
expect to blossom in the future.”

Perhaps the most prominent federal entity under the NNI umbrella is the Department of Defense, which
in May unveiled its new $50 million Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at M.I.T. The Institute, which
treats soldiers as “integrated platform systems” rather than human beings, will bring together M.I.T.
scientists, military officers, and researchers from private industry to develop lighter, stronger clothes
and equipment for the Army. Some of the projects being suggested include an “exoskeleton” or
“dynamic armor,” which could become hard or soft at a soldier’s command, and other clothes that
could store energy — like the energy wasted in every footstep — and employ it later to give the soldier
superhuman strength. All the technologies being developed at the Institute — like all other nanotech
projects publicly acknowledged by the Defense Department — are essentially defensive, not offensive,
in nature, so they are unlikely to incite opposition.

At the same time, because the benefits of nanotechnology are still largely uncertain, there is not yet a
natural constituency for nanotech legislation — except for the nanotech companies themselves. They
are represented by the New York-based NanoBusiness Alliance, a trade group founded in 2001 by F. Mark
Modzelewski, who acts as the Alliance’s executive director. Modzelewski, who modeled his group after
the Biotechnology Industry Organization, was a low-ranking official in the Clinton Administration —
which hasn’t stopped him from making Newt Gingrich, that starry-eyed technophile, the Alliance’s
honorary chairman. Gingrich told the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report that he believes that “those
countries that master the process of nanoscale manufacturing and engineering will have a huge job
boom over the next twenty years, just like aviation and computing companies in the last forty years,
and just as railroad, steam engine and textile companies were decisive in the nineteenth century.”

Since the politics of nanotechnology are still immature, there is no prominent opponent of
nanotechnology in the nation’s capital or even a unifying rationale for such opposition. The most
organized opposition to nanotechnology has come from the ETC Group, a liberal Canadian
environmental outfit that has published a series of harshly critical reports on nanotechnology — some of
them detailed and provocative. In late July, Greenpeace issued its first report on nanotechnology, with
ambiguous conclusions. [Available in PDF here.] A few other environmentalist groups have spoken out
against nanotechnology, but there hasn’t yet been any movement comparable to the massive
international campaigns against genetically modified foods. It is safe to speculate that these leftist
groups will in time coalesce into an anti-nanotech front, using the rhetoric of anti-corporatism and
environmental extremism to make their case. They will likely be opposed by the techno-libertarian and
patient advocacy groups who presently support human cloning and embryonic stem cell research, and by

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the mainstream political establishment, at both the national and state levels, which sees nanotech as a
way to boost the economy.

Just as there is no prominent figure in Washington arguing against nanotechnology, there is currently no
prominent advocate of Eric Drexler’s radical vision of nanotechnology. The closest thing to such an
advocate may be Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor from the University of Tennessee, whose
Instapundit website and online columns are read by many Washingtonians. Reynolds frequently discusses
nanotechnology, and when he does, he openly supports Drexler’s ideas. (He also serves on the board of
the Foresight Institute.) Reynolds is one of the few writers who understands both the workings of
government and the basic theories of nanotechnology, which makes him useful to readers in the
nation’s capital.

If still unformed, however, there is reason to believe that public debate about nanotech is about to take
off — with two new nanotech organizations founded in just the past year. The Center for Responsible
Nanotechnology, run by a social activist and a nanosystems theorist, has been cranking out publications
since January. “What we want,” says Chris Phoenix, one of the Center’s founders, “is to see molecular
nanotechnology policy developed and implemented with a care appropriate to its powerful and probably
transformative nature.” And two Washingtonians — a futurist and an antitrust lawyer — are in the
process of launching the Nanotechnology Policy Forum to improve the quality of public discourse about
nanotech. They intend to host events every few months, and to stay scrupulously evenhanded: the
advisory panel planned for the organization will include both friends and foes of nanotech — as well as
present and former congressmen.

Congress also seems slightly more attuned to the need for debate about nanotechnology. Plans are afoot
in both the House and the Senate to fund studies of the social, economic, and environmental
implications of nanotechnology.

Also, legislation currently wending its way through Congress would establish “grand challenges” for
nanotechnology: long-term objectives akin to President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the Moon.
[See S. 189 in the Senate, and H.R. 283 in the House.] While it isn’t at all clear at this stage that
nanotechnology can capture the imagination of the public like the Moon missions did, there is one
obvious goal that would make an excellent “grand challenge” — a goal presently overlooked in all the
millions of federal dollars going to nanotech: the assembler breakthrough. And just as the Apollo
missions to the Moon were preceded by missions with incremental goals (achieved by the Mercury and
Gemini programs), an ambitious nanotechnology project aspiring to make the world’s first assembler
could also set intermediate goals, like the creation of a basic nanoscale computer or a nanoscale
robotic arm. But the National Nanotechnology Initiative is so focused on developing mainstream
nanotech that Drexler’s nanotechnology has found neither a great advocate nor a great critic.

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The Challenge Ahead

One Congressman, speaking on the House floor on May 7 of this year, said that nanotechnology may
“create levels of intelligence that may be our protector, may be our competitor, or may simply regard
us as pets. Or it may change our definition of what it is to be a human being.” He said this with no
indication of outrage or regret; he didn’t rail against the prospect of a posthuman future; he expressed
no aversion to life as a pet. Instead, he said that we need to talk about these issues, “to see how we
can deal” with them, and to “get input from a wide range of society.”

One proposal now under consideration is to create an advisory committee of “nonscientific and
nontechnical” Americans to make recommendations about nanotechnology. This provision was inspired
by the testimony of technology critic Langdon Winner before a House committee in April. “Congress
should seek to create ways in which small panels of ordinary, disinterested citizens, selected in much
the same way that we now choose juries in cases of law, [could] be assembled to examine important
societal issues about nanotechnology,” Winner said. The panels would listen to news and arguments,
“deliberate on their findings, and write reports offering policy advice.”

This sort of citizen panel would admittedly be an excellent gesture, a symbol of the fact that
technological progress doesn’t take place in a vacuum — that science and technology affect society as a
whole and must remain subject to political oversight. But if the goal is really to inform the public and to
get ordinary citizens to think about the implications of nanotechnology, a few citizen panels writing
obscure reports won’t have much effect. Nanotechnology education is most needed in newsrooms across
the country and in the halls of the Capitol itself: We need reporters who know what they’re talking
about and who ask the right questions, and we need political leaders who can guide us through the
confusing and potentially perilous times ahead.

This much seems clear: If molecular nanotechnology ever becomes a reality, we can expect massive
social disruptions. As for the nature of these disruptions, we can, at best, only speculate.

First, we will hear complaints that the benefits of the new technology aren’t being shared equitably;
that the poor are being left out. But that problem will quickly fade away, as usually happens in our
innovative market economy. (Think of the notorious “digital divide” of the 1990s, for instance; it’s now
all but gone.)

Second, we will reorganize our society and economy, shifting workers, eliminating jobs, and completely

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restructuring entire industries. We will hear questions about how our character will change: Will the
abundance made possible by molecular manufacturing cause us to slip into hedonistic excess? Or might
it have the reverse effect, making us less materialistic? Will life become so easy for us that it loses all
meaning, or is it in our nature to keep seeking new challenges? (These questions may be as groundless
as the “Leisure Question” that had social scientists wringing their hands a few decades ago, worrying
about what we would do with all our free time in the age of automation and computers.)

Third, we will have to confront the “extinctionist” challenge and decide who we are. Nanotechnology
raises many of the same ethical issues as biotechnology, and indeed the two techniques overlap. How
much will we tinker with and revise our bodies? Will we choose a future as men or machines? Will we be
able to use nanotechnology without drowning in nanotechnology, losing ourselves in nanotechnology,
becoming nanotechnology?

And finally, we will be charged with rethinking our place in the universe. Our new powers of precision
and perfection could lead us to a deeper appreciation for life — or they could make us lose all respect
for the imperfect world we inhabit and the imperfect beings we have always been. The era of
nanotechnology may be one of hubris and overreach, where we use our godlike powers to make the
world anew. Is there room for wonder in a future where atoms march at our command?

Public debate about these matters will surely stay much lower to the ground — with arguments about
where best to invest nanotech resources or about the quantifiable dangers of nanotechnology to the
health and well-being of man and nature. Those who care about the deeper questions — about what
nanotechnology means for human nature — must also master the details, both political and scientific.
And they must offer not only lamentations for the disruptions and dehumanization that nanotechnology
might cause, but a sensible vision of how nanotechnology might do some practical good — or even stir
the very wonder that could be diminished by rearranging the smallest parts without seeing the whole.

Adam Keiper is managing editor of The New Atlantis. He can be reached at

akeiper@thenewatlantis.com.

Adam Keiper, "The Nanotechnology Revolution," The New Atlantis, Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 17-34.

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