Nature’s nanomachines

In 1986, Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, a vision of what the nascent science of nanotechnology might mean for the future. Drexler claimed that nanoscale robots would one day swim through our bloodstream, attacking invaders like viruses and removing sclerotic deposits from the blood-vessel walls.

Drexler laid out the technical aspects of his vision in a 1992 book, Nanosystems, which argued that a ‘molecular assembler’ would position atoms exactly where we want them to build nanoscale devices such as motors and gears out of diamond-like carbon. If such assemblers could build themselves, this manufacturing process could be cheaply scaled up to make us masters of matter with atomic precision.

The books were hugely influential on futurologists. In Ray Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Drexlerian nanotechnology played a key role in the imagined merging of human and machine that Kurzweil believed would usher in a form of immortality.

Scientists were less enamoured. Some accused him of disregarding basic chemical principles by supposing atoms could be arranged into arbitrary structures.