3 December 2020 K. Eric Drexler Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines – of molecular machines that are part of replicators – and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
3 December 2020 K. Eric Drexler I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
3 December 2020 K. Eric Drexler You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn’t a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we’re third.
3 December 2020 K. Eric Drexler My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.
3 December 2020 K. Eric Drexler But while doing that I’d been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.
