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A scientist becomes a perfect superman after injecting himself with self-replicating microscopic machines that continually repair his organs. A man rents a device that sets tiny machines loose in his brain, rewiring it so that he becomes, for a brief time, a different person. A cell-repair nanotech machine -- a "nanny" -- fed with one person’s DNA and set to repairing another’s cells, begins turning the second person into the first. Infoviruses systematically reprogram human genes, redirecting evolution. Society is reshaped from top to bottom by nanotechnology. Experimental nanomachines escape from the lab and destroy the world.
Mere science fiction, you say? Of course. Specifically, these are the plots of several science fiction stories appearing in Nanotech, a collection of cautionary tales in the subgenre of nanotechnology-based science fiction, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozios (Ace Books, 1998; ISBN 0-441-00585-3). Science fiction writers were profoundly influenced by the publication of Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation. In that book and in the more technical Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (John Wiley & Sons, 1992; ISBN 0-47-157-518-6), Drexler defined the field of nanotechnology, mapped out its challenges, and articulated its most promising avenues of research. A number of science fiction writers staked out nanotech as their chosen science to fictionalize, and a subgenre was born.
Others besides science fiction writers were influenced by Engines of Creation. Researchers around the world have been exploring the possibilities for nanotechnology since the book’s publication. Last fall, Drexler’s Foresight Institute brought the leading researchers together to explore the state of the art in nanotechnology today. So far, none of the predictions of nanotech science fiction have come true. So far.
For more information on nanotechnology:
Merkle and Walch cleared a trail a significant distance in the direction of such nanomanufacturing. Merkle’s work can be seen at http://nano.xerox.com/nano/.
In Ghadiri’s lab, researchers have designed and built a number of self-assembling nanotubes. Ghadiri’s work is described at his web site (http://www.scripps.edu/pub/ghadiri/), and you can watch an animation of the replication process at http://www.scripps.edu/pub/ghadiri/html/selfrepli.html.
The Cornell researchers, whose work is described at http://www.foresight.org/, are working with nanodevices that are on a scale compatible with F1-ATPase.
Washington University student Min Feng Yu showed a movie (you can see it at http://www.foresight.org/) of a real breakthrough -- the direct manipulation, independently in all three dimensions plus rotation, of a 5 nm-diameter nanotube.
-- Michael Swaine