Kim Eric Drexler, or Eric Drexler as he prefers to be known, is concerned with emerging technologies and their future usage. He is best known for his work in nanotechnology, the use of molecular machines to build objects of small size.
Eric Drexler was born in Oakland, California, where he went to school. An early interest in space led him to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he founded the MIT space habitat study group. In 1977 he gained his B.S. in interdisciplinary science and followed this with an M.S. in engineering, which he completed in 1979. His thesis was on the design of a high-performance solar sail system. Keeping the MIT link very much alive Drexler worked from 1980 to 1986 as a research affiliate in the space systems laboratory, only leaving this position to take up a similar one in the artificial intelligence laboratory. From 1986 to 1991 Drexler was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, working in the Department of Computer Science under Nils Nilsson. As well as conducting research at Stanford, Drexler taught a course on nanotechnology and exploratory engineering in 1988--the first course of its kind in the world. At the end of 1991 Drexler was awarded his Ph.D. by MIT, where he had been working under the supervision of Marvin Minsky. The title of Drexler's Ph.D. thesis was Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation. In 1981, while still a graduate student, Drexler introduced the word "nanotechnology" to the world. From 1991 to at least 2001 Drexler held the position of research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing at Palo Alto, California.
During his lifetime, Drexler has produced a number of books including Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation, which was awarded the Outstanding Computer Science Book for 1992 by the Association of American Publishers. This is just one of many awards Drexler has received. Others include the Kilby Young Innovator Award in 1993, and the National Space Society Scientist/Engineer Award in 1991.
From 1986 onwards Drexler has also been the chairman and president of the Foresight Institute (a non-profit educational organization whose role is to promote advanced technologies) and between 1979 and 1996 he served several times as a member of the board of directors at the National Space Society.
The work that Drexler has spearheaded has allowed him to advance research in nanotechnology, specifically in the areas of molecular manufacturing systems that will be able to construct computers smaller than human cells and machines capable of repairing cells. Drexler is also interested in using living systems to develop machines based on folded proteins. All living organisms produce proteins based on the instructions contained within the cell's DNA. Drexler envisions gene synthesis and recombinant DNA technology being used to manufacture the proteins required to make these machines. This sort of "manufacturing system" will allow components to be placed with atomic precision. One current practical problem is that science is as yet unable to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein based purely on its amino acid sequence. There are already biological analogues of virtually every technological aspect necessary; for example, motors are found as flagella in bacteria, membrane proteins can act as pumps, and control systems are seen in the genetic code of every living organism. When Drexler was preparing his first paper on the subject of nanotechnology (1981, Molecular Engineering: An Approach to the Development of General Capabilities for Molecular Manipulation, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the U.S.A.) he found that the idea of miniaturization and manufacturing at the atomic level had been foreshadowed by Richard Feynman in 1959, but that little practical work had been done at the atomic scale until Drexler himself came along. Drexler believes that the advent of nanotechnology will cut down on waste and eventually produce a very clean manufacturing processes. He also argues that along with this reduction in pollution there will be a leap in computing power comparable to that seen in the move from a hand-cranked adding machine to the latest supercomputer. Drexler pictures a system in which a single desktop computer will have more computing power than existed in the whole world at the start of the twenty-first century. Drexler is interested in the opportunities this new technology will present as well as the social changes it will bring, which he argues will be greater than the changes that occurred with the industrial revolution.
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