NANO

Eric Drexler

Bangalore is becoming an essential stopover for both politicians and major figures in science and technology. It is not unusual to have several nobel laureates in town at once. Craig Venter breezed through last month (Bangalore's NCBS is a frontier outpost for pioneering work in synthetic biology) and last week we had Eric Drexler, the 'father' of nanotechnology. He was speaking at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, an extraordinary, almost monastic, oasis of learning in the centre of Bangalore, which hosted our Space and Culture Symposium last year.

Drexler was here to espouse engineering solutions for productive nanosystems, which, he claimed, could be the solution to climate change and the world's coming energy crisis. He also threw in some innovative concepts such as building roads out of photovoltaic material. The bad new is although we are beginning to be able to manipulate precise atomic structures and develop interesting new materials through nanothechnology, we have still not yet arrived at building 'molecular machines'. This breakthough technology, as demonstrated in Drexler's visuals, will involve tiny cogs and gears, almost a backward industrial revolution in which the factories of the Victorian era will be reproduced at the molecular level. For those who know the history of nanotechnology it is difficult to hear Drexler's name without recalling media reports of dire predictions of out-of-control 'nanobugs'  - a result of Drexler's warnings in 1992 of the dangers of 'grey goo' . He now takes responsibility for initiating this paranoia, but says that a routine focus on health and safety was misinterpreted. Rightly he points out that with the engineering still being worked on, 'the future will be different to what we expect.'

Rob La Frenais, Curator

Grey Goo