The Engines Of Creation

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

Space and time are relative. Our behavior is ruled by our subconscious mind. The most powerful machines are built one atom at a time. When the history of human civilization is rewritten a few centuries hence, the name Eric Drexler just might appear alongside those of Einstein and Freud. Drexler, 43, is the founding father of nanotechnology, the idea of using individual atoms and molecules to build practical machines.

Drexler was an M.I.T. undergraduate studying genetic engineering in the mid-1970s when he had his epiphany: if you could engineer DNA on a molecular level, why not build machines out of atoms, program them to build more machines and so on, until you had millions of infinitesimal nanobots, endlessly restocking the food supply, say, or swarming through the bloodstream eradicating disease, or building skyscrapers from industrial waste? If nanotech was viable, it promised a gleaming future of virtually limitless wealth and endlessly renewable resources.

That's an immense if. Drexler's idea was initially dismissed as science fiction, but even skeptics admit that, unlike time travel and warp drives, nothing about it actually violates the laws of physics. And when in 1989 an IBM team famously spelled the Big Blue logo in xenon atoms, nanotech spread from the basements of feverish acolytes poring over Drexler's seminal book, Engines of Creation (1986), to the research labs of NASA and Xerox PARC. Today nanotech researchers speak not of if but of when. Great leaps forward come from thinking outside the box. Drexler may be remembered as the man who saw how to build a whole new box.

--By Michael Krantz