Nanotechnology: Are Molecular Assemblers Possible?

Roland Piquepaille writes "Two experts in the field of nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler, Ph.D., cofounder of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., and the person who coined the term "nanotechnology," and Richard E. Smalley, Ph.D., a professor at Rice University and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, exchanged open letters about "molecular assemblers" -- devices capable of positioning atoms and molecules for precisely defined reactions in almost any environment. These letters are making the -- long -- cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News. At the end of this rich exchange of four letters, they still disagree about the issue. Drexler thinks "molecular assemblers" are possible while Smalley denies it. Who is right? Don't count on me to give an answer. This summary contains some forceful quotes from the original letters."

Raises interesting questions

[Steve 'Rim' Jobs]

If, in the future, copying physical objects is nearly as easy as copying information on a computer, will corporations lobby to pass laws that make it illegal to do so? In other words, will I be arrested one day for making a copy of my friend's Ferrari?

Lest we forget

[carl67lp]

Richard Feynman talked about nanotechnology way back in 1959--before "nanotechnology" was even a word.

It kind of irks me that the person who coins a word gets more credit than a person who talked about the actual process--nearly thirty years prior.

Read Feynman's talk at the Zyvex Web site [zyvex.com].

I can see what the problem might be

[Dunark]

There is a fundamental obstacle to creating moleular assemblers: What do you make them out of?

Imagine that you were given the task of designing a machine to lay bricks. This probably would not be all that difficult, considering all of the things we already do with robots.
However, the problem becomes much more difficult if I add the stipulation that the machine be constructed entirely from bricks and mortar.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Raises interesting questions

[Walterk]

Ferraris are not IP, so you could copy it freely. However, this would devaluate all Ferraris and would be frowned upon by the company. Ferrari Inc. would then copyright the design of the car and include a license with your friend's Ferrari.

By this time it will not be possible to buy a Ferrari, but only to license a copy. Therefore official Ferrari licenses will be a hot commodity for the wealthy and they will slap licenses on the car windows, the cars however will not become their property.

Of course thieves will see this trend and nab the licenses out of the Ferrari, instead of the car itself, which will be worthless.

Hence you could copy a Ferrari, but what good would it do you, as it wouldn't be yours anyway.

Love and Molecular Assemblers

[ericspinder]

I think that I got most of the arguments, but it's hard to take a stand. I especially liked this "counterpoint" quote:

Much like you can't make a boy and a girl fall in love with each other simply by pushing them together, you cannot make precise chemistry occur as desired between two molecular objects with simple mechanical motion along a few degrees of freedom in the assembler-fixed frame of reference. Chemistry, like love, is more subtle than that. You need to guide the reactants down a particular reaction coordinate, and this coordinate treads through a many-dimensional hyperspace.

*sigh* I'm touched.

Also I found it interesting that the usage of Nanotechnology was changed so greatly that the creator of the term accepts the newer phrase 'molecular assemblers' for that process.

DNA

[MindStalker]

They say its impossible, but isn't DNA essentially just that, and I'm quite sure some lab recently built a transitor from DNA so I'd say its definatly possible.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[tsmccaff]

I don't know if current copyright and patent laws can handle these questions. It is legal for me to carve a replica of a wooden chair with a sawblade. Is that substantially different from having a molecular assembler do the job?

Well, I read the letters

[panurge]

I'm not a nanotechnologist but I have had a fair bit to do with the behavior of atoms on surfaces, especially metals. I think that Smalley seems to have a much closer grasp on the real world than Drexler. The idea of a nanobot twisting a pi-bond here and snapping a sigma-bond there seems quite ludicrous; where such reactions occcur in the real world it is because of the properties of the exact molecules involved and is reaction-specific. You can't just say "well, this works with an iron atom in a hemoglobin molecule, so let's make a different carrier molecule with the same geometry, put it on a robot arm and use it to collect up nickel atoms, or whatever". Biology works because over billions of years a limited group of reactions has been found to work on a limited range of materials, in bulk and in carrier liquids. The notion that this means you can just build little tiny cranes and waggle atoms around does not follow.

From reading the letters I don't think Drexler has really addressed the problems raised by Smalley fingers at all, he just tries to brush the problems aside.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[Space cowboy]

Especially if you combine P2P with nanotech. Want something ? Just download the "program" from any.where and create it.

Wow, we're already shaking the foundations of some markets (low-to-zero-cost products are not historically very common, but digital assets have essentially zero duplication costs), but so far it's been limited to the digital world. Expect major changes if we can at any time expand that into the physical world...

Simon.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[markfive]

So why not just make a copy of the license?

Cells do it

[rlp]

Ribosomes are essentially molecular assemblers that build proteins out of amino acids using instructions from messenger RNA (originally transcribed from the DNA in the nucleus). So, it's not only possible, your cells are doing it as you read this.

Re:Lest we forget

[kasparov]

Actually, in the above mentioned Feynman lecture, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom [zyvex.com], Feynman talks about making machines that make smaller machines that make smaller machines that make... you get the picture. From the above lecture:

Why can't we manufacture these small computers somewhat like we manufacture the big ones? Why can't we drill holes, cut things, solder things, stamp things out, mold different shapes all at an infinitesimal level? What are the limitations as to how small a thing has to be before you can no longer mold it? How many times when you are working on something frustratingly tiny like your wife's wrist watch, have you said to yourself, ``If I could only train an ant to do this!'' What I would like to suggest is the possibility of training an ant to train a mite to do this. What are the possibilities of small but movable machines? They may or may not be useful, but they surely would be fun to make.

He was not only talking about nanobiology.

Re:I never understood how it was supposed to work.

[Smiling_Jack]

Now, I have only a vague understanding of the subject, but from what I read, I was lead to believe that you didn't have one little agent running around like a little gnome (or group thereof) building some complicated structure. You had a sequence of these things which acted like an assembly line. Each agent knows how to slap a specific atom or subset of atoms onto some atomic structure it receives, and only does something when it receives that atomic structure. So there wouldn't really need to be any memory, or very little, since it only does a specific task repeatedly. The thing could almost be stateless.

Again, this is my dim recollection from something I read awhile back, so I bow down before more informed heads.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[jacem]

That is true of course until a Finish auto mechanic name Tinus Lorvads creates a version of the Ferrari from scratch completely free of patented or copywritten source. Of course after this core capability become availably millions of auto mechanics the world over start to make improvements to the Tirrari until through their combined effort a vehicle is developed that can go 1000 MPH gets a million miles to the gallon and is almost impossible to crash.
Most of the major auto makers of course will than start a propaganda campaign about how bad an dangerous the Tirrari is because the builder has to bolt the seats in himself.

Why does this sound familiar?

Jacem

Re:I can see what the problem might be

[HeghmoH]

Replace "bricks" with "cells", and you have just made all life impossible. We know that self-replicating machines are possible, because we are surrounded by them everywhere all the time. It may be difficult, but it is obviously not a "fundamental obstacle".

They try to come after you

[jetmarc]

It doesn't need molecular technology. They already try to come after you even today. See this nice (and real) example:

http://www.mb-portal.net/html/news/special/2003_ sl r-pl_us.htm

Some guy from Poland "copied" the new Mercedes SLR, long before the real car hits the market. Mercedes tried to buy it from it to get it off the streets. Because that failed, they sue him.

Marc

Existence proof.

[AJWM]

Of course molecular assemblers are possible. Your body contains billions of them -- ribosomes.

A ribosome (a combination of several large protein molecules) constructs arbitrary protein molecules from individual amino acids according to the instructions on a strand of RNA (copied from DNA). Sounds like a molecular assembler to me.

Now, as to whether they can be made smaller and more flexible than that (nanotech's "universal assembler") is another question -- ribosomes may turn out to be the minimum possible assembler. Or not.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[Saige]

I would like to believe such a society is not only possible, but likely. However, I don't see a good way to get from here to there. In most western societies, capitalism seems to be a de-facto system, with few people questioning if it's the best way to do things.

How do we go from a system where everything has a value, and you only get items or services of value by providing items of services of equivalent values, to a system where things are free? The current system would encourage a company who developed assemblers to hold onto those assemblers, and instead of selling systems that can produce wide arrays of products, just making the products and selling them. There is no incentive to sell such production machines, since they could be seen as sabotaging any future profit the company could make. "But they no longer need to make money" you can point out - but even today, people and companies that have all the money they need are still trying to earn more.

If someone invented an assembler mechanism today, and started giving away machines that could make just about anything needed, society would collapse. Without a good path from here to there, it might be quite an unpleasant road.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[drinkypoo]

Incidentally Ferrari already has cars you can't buy, you can only lease them. I believe the F50 is one of these cars. Not sure about the F40, I think some of those are privately owned.

Rumor has it that they have a drive recorder in the car and if you don't drive it enough, and fast enough, then they terminate your lease. They want your ferrari out there kicking ass and taking names.

Re:Possibilities...

[Noren]

[Arthur C.] Clarke's First Law [faqs.org](1962):

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

His Third Law is more well known, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

However, there's also Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law (1977):

When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion -- the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point, we have the equivalent of Star Trek replicators and money is no longer an issue. So Ferrari wouldn't be "selling" anything because there wouldn't be anything you can give them that they can't already replicate themselves. Although I suppose, then, it's going to be a game of IP, as the shortage will no longer be of supplies but of services, like designing cars. So we will probably barter "assembler files" until there are enough open source versions that the common folk get what they need and the market collapses.

Capitalism out?

[luckyguesser]

Maybe when everyone has their own personal assembler, no one will feel compelled to buy anything anymore. Therefore, the only people in business selling a product will be those selling assemblers. But maybe there will also come a day when the government provides them, too... kinda like phone booths. The phone book could be a directory of things it can make. Anyway, the market would die, but only products. People selling services would still be valued.
Of course, I can imagine that someone would get the idea to copy a person so that they wouldn't even have to pay for services... just make a servant. I think in this case the government would make a law against copying a human- much in the same lines with the cloning issue today- so as not to devalue the human life ;). Maybe if everyone had anything they wanted at the touch of a button, we would all shift our new attention to creating new and better things, instead of the pursuit of money. Of course, money would have to be kept track of electronically, if it still existed, since it could easily be copied. True, the serial numbers would be the same, but it could be spent before it was caught as a double.

Well, that's the end of my rant.. tell me what you think. Also, I have a question. Forgive me for not RTFA, but from what the poster said, it seemed to point at the fact that the assemblers simply rearranged matter. On what level does this happen? i.e. would i be able to make an apple if i threw in some raw glucose, pure water, etc.? would i need even that?

I side with Drexler.

[bob_jenkins]

I read the letters, and skimmed Drexler's "Nanotechnolgy: ..." book.

I think Smalley's argument is that for a specific reaction between two molecules, you need something like an enzyme designed specifically for that reaction. The number of possible molecules is astronomical, and the number of pairs astronomical squared.

I hear you can treat most of molecules mechanically except for a few dozen atoms surrounding the reaction site. That limits it to, let's say, 2^^30 possible molecules, so 2^^60 reactions you need specific enzymes for. Designing any one of those 2^^60 enzymes or reaction paths is feasible. Making an index iwth 2^^60 entries is feasible, given atom-scale memory, although it isn't microscopic. Drexler suggested such an index for diamondoid struts of different sizes in "Nanotechnology: ...". Nanotech is going to make heavy use of indexes like this. Storing all those enzymes, and shipping them one after another to the right place, is going to be SLOW. I suppose you could pipeline your enzyme fetches.

The real number of enzymes needed is much smaller than 2^^60. To get a self-assembling molecule, assuming you feed it the right basic building blocks, you don't need a universal assembler. DNA limits itself to 4 molecules with a single type of connecting part. Proteins limit themselves to 24 molecules (I don't know if the connecting parts are standardized but I suspect they are). Ribosomes can construct ribosomes, so we already know self-assembling machines are possible.

An interesting question is, given an assembler that knows how to do some fixed set of assemblies, what can be built? How big a set is needed? The smaller the set, the less work is needed to get the correct configuration for each reaction. Perhaps we need specialized factories for some building blocks with standard connectors, then just a tape-reading assembler that can connect standard connectors? Standards simplify things.

Re:energy from chemicals

[Galvatron]

Yeah, um, how do you think you're going to get the energy to "Make gasoline, or hydrogen at home?" Thermodynamics still applies when you're dealing with nanobots, you can't get more energy out than you put in.

Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age is probably a more reasonable assesment of where things will go. People will still be employed in the design of new machines, and will be able to afford better pieces of land, and more electricity (Stephenson also suggested that perhaps handmade items would become status symbols). The (unemployed?) masses will live in unparalleled comfort from a historical perspective, being well clothed, fed, etc.

Re:Raises interesting questions

[Ralph Wiggam]

Thank you for pointing out that by the time we can molecularly assemble something as large and complex as a Ferrari that the world will be a very different place.

We will still have money, but we will buy different things. Information and services will still be scarce and need to be purchased. Also, the inputs for these assemblers will still have some scarcity. Obviously the biggies like carbon and oxygen aren't hard to get a hold of, but rare elements will be very valuable.

Here's some free investment advice for the future. The first time someone publishes a successful assembler experiment, sell diamonds and buy gold.

-B

My Nano Assembler design

[GodSpiral]

Apparently my design for a molecular assembler is deemed impossible for the sticky or fat finger aspect, but I need help understanding why this is impossible. I think I can circumvent that problem.

Anyways here's the design. It is simple and achievable. It is not conducive to building/replicating itself easily though.

The core is an STM microscope-like device, with many parralel tips each working on its own square millimeter (or smaller) area. Needle Tips or fingers doped with the next mollecule (properly oriented) to be inserted move along a conveyor belt where each are inserted into one of the parallel heads, the head then sticks the molecule in place, then the needle is sucked out, and sent to be refilled.

I don't really have a process for making mollecules, and placing them in the proper orientation on a needle.
The one good thing about this design, is that there probably exists a needle material than can react "properly" with any given mollecule, such that it can 1) capture it, and 2) release it. (One method of releasing could just be to jab the needle quickly forward, flinging the package into place).

There's one problem with Drexler's universal assembler theory, with little publicity, that is only partially solved by my design. There is not an infinite number of universal assemblers created instantly, and as a secondary problem, programming them to work and move around cooperatively is not easy, and increases their required size if only because of the massive cpu they need to operate with.

The Other issue only partially addressed is speed. If everything is built using 3d tetris-like merging of 10nm building blocks (mollecules), then finishing a square milimeter takes 10B blocks. A quadrillion blocks makes a cubic milimeter of something. Even at 1 billion blocks per second, it takes 11.5 days to make 1 milimeter thick object. The billion blocks per second seems outrageously high to reach, but another way to increase throughput (but increase congestion of feeder needles) is to have denser parallel heads. If each head works on a square micrometer area, then building a cubic micrometer object takes 1 million 10nm blocks. At (only) 100K blocks per second, a 1mm thick object takes 10,000 secs = 2.77 hours

There's one other big problem. Like building a house of cards on an uneven surface, mollecules won't necessarily maintain a desired orientation without simultaneously placing adjoining molecules to couterbalance them. Seems like there would be a solution to this, with all the arms in such close proximity, but it would also slow down the process.

Common misconceptions about our nanotech future

[danila]

Most people do not really understand the potential impact of mature nanotechnologies. And it's easy to see why - even Drexler's book Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution gives some really ridiculous examples (may be to make it simplier to understand). Here are my responses to two of particularly misleading comments in this thread.

2BorgDrone [slashdot.org] :

However, if molecular assemblers ever become mainstream I'd rather design my own car and let it assemble that. If everyone is driving a Ferrari I'd rather have something different.
When molecular assemblers become mainstream, having a car would be rather pointless. First, there are unlikely to be any streets where you can impress chicks, since everyone would be able to live wherever on Earth they like. Second, there probably won?t be any roads, since you don?t need to transport goods (they can be manufactured from CO2 on the spot) and it?s easier to fly people from A to B. Third, designed cars would be as old-fashioned as horse carriages now ? smart completely transformable people-movers would be all the rage. And forth, you will be able to drive any kind of car in your personal virtual reality simulation, so you don?t need to actually design the car (just program how it should behave) and the issue of IP would be moot.

2jchoyt [slashdot.org] :
Money will still have value. Someone has to create and/or design food, clothing, medicine, entertainment, etc.
Strong AIs will be able to create and or/design everything, including these things you describe. Furthermore, people will not need food, because it will be easier to just get energy from the environment without any conscious actions like eating from your side. Clothing is likely to be designed for the sake of it. Most couturiers are not in this business for money, they do it because they like it, and when all fabrics and basic production operations will become free, as well as everything they need personally, they are unlikely to charge you anything for their latest fashionable clothes. Medicine will not be used, because our bodies will be redesigned to include a smart AI-based immune system, capable of fixing most problems, except, may be, for being in the epicenter of the thermonuclear explosion. So most things you mention will not be needed and those that still will be needed, will be done by professional volunteers for free.