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...