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No gooey nonsense

K. Eric Drexler   (28 February 2008)  Nanorex

The article states that "...the multitude of "grey goo" scenarios, first hinted at by nanotechnology theorist Dr. K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book "Engines of Creation", has raised hair on the heads of many safety officers and researchers active in the field...." I am pleased to see that this distances me somewhat from the crazy scenarios that have circulated in popular media for the last 20 years, but I'd like to go a bit further.

I wouldn't say that I hinted at these scenarios, per se, but instead that they are popular fantasies that grew out of a few quite different statements in my first book. Moreover, even those statements pertained to ideas that were thoroughly obsolete a few years later (see Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, Wiley/Interscience, 1992 ), There is nothing even superficially resembling a nanobug in these and more recent molecular manufacturing concepts. A 2006 essay in Science magazine's EurekAlert and the 2007 Battelle-led Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems may be of interest in this regard.

Any connection between nanoparticles and all this is, of course, absurd, as I'd be the first to point out (and have!).

Competing interests

None declared

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