The Hollowness of Denial

An article published today documents that opposition toward molecular manufacturing, even from the most prominent scientists, is often groundless.

Perhaps the most prominent opponent of molecular manufacturing is Richard Smalley, who has stated that "Self-replicating, mechanical nanobots are simply not possible in our world."

Patrick Bailey's article, appearing today in BetterHumans.com, destroys Smalley's arguments in detail. Smalley says that a mechanosynthetic system will require "fingers" to pick up atoms, and those fingers will be too "sticky" and too "fat" to do useful chemistry. However, as Bailey points out (and as Drexler has pointed out for years), no one has seriously proposed picking up lone atoms in fingers or pincers, so these arguments are irrelevant.

More recently, Smalley argued that useful chemistry could only happen underwater using things like enzymes. This argument is simply incorrect. Bailey talked with Alexander Klibanov, who discovered over two decades ago that enzymes work just fine without water. Klibanov says, "clearly [Smalley's] statements about nonaqueous enzyme catalysis are incorrect. There have been hundreds and perhaps thousands of papers published about nonaqueous enzyme catalysis since our first paper was published 20 years ago."

Other arguments raised against molecular manufacturing include the idea that it will be too slow. Bailey deals with this as well, arguing (as is well known in the molecular manufacturing field) that exponential manufacturing of mechanosynthetic systems will allow massive parallel production even with relatively slow mechanosynthetic methods.

Bailey notes that "to learn more about these objections, I approached several of the prominent opponents of Drexler's position. Unfortunately, they either could not be reached for comment or actively declined to be interviewed." This does not surprise me, since I have been similarly unable to get useful answers from some of the opponents. I predict that they will react the same when confronted with any journalist who knows enough not to be satisfied with sound-bite arguments. I will be very interested to see what happens as the story is picked up by more famous publications.

Chris Phoenix

[Correction: The original version of this article gave Patrick Bailey's name as Patrick Bishop. Sorry, Patrick!]

Comments

[Janessa Ravenwood]

Yes...the lights are starting to be turned on and already they're scurrying back to their hidey-holes. I look forward to watching more of this show with a big bag of popcorn... :-)

[nano123]

Even this webpage has a link to the article:

http://www.nano.gov/html/news/current.html

That's right, a webpage of the same group that used to call nanobots "science fiction."