Earthquake

Earthquakes and hurricanes are big obvious traumatic events that are reported widely. Today is the 100th anniversary of the earthquake and fire that nearly destroyed San Francisco. That lovely city, of course, has been reborn. Another great city, New Orleans, today still lays prostrate from a different yet equally awesome force of nature May New Orleans’ citizens find within themselves the resolve to rebuild (because it’s plain that for all the fine promises made, the government ain’t gonna do much). The significance of events like hurricanes and earthquakes is easy to understand and difficult to miss. But in any given year, there are many, many significant events that are little noted at the time, because their importance doesn’t become clear for years to come.

On September 18, 1991, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to K. Eric Drexler in “molecular nanotechnology.” This degree was very peculiar because, at that time, MIT had no department of nanotechnology and, in fact, offered no degree program or even courses in the subject. In a very real sense, the whole concept of nanotechnology was invented by Drexler himself and popularized through his book, The Engines of Creation, published in 1986. Not that there wasn’t a lot of research on tiny, nanoscale objects that preceded Drexler. Of course there was, but research on these objects was labeled chemistry or physics or biotechnology or materials sciences. Drexler’s singular accomplishment was to recognize that these amounted to all one subject at the nanoscale. The publication of Engines of Creation was an earthquake and the awarding of his degree was in recognition of that event, an aftershock significant in itself. Drexler’s Ph.D., appropriately, was the first awarded anywhere in nanotechnology.

Yesterday, serial entrepreneur Larry Bock (founder of Nanosys) and his wife Diane made a gift to the College of Chemistry to establish an endowed chair in nanotechnology at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Another aftershock. All across the country and across the world there are now university programs in nanotechnology and nanoscale science, and billions of dollars are being spent to establish infrastructure to make these programs viable. And yet through most of the twentieth century, a scant few years ago, a student couldn’t have pursued a degree in this field at all. Because, before Drexler, nanotechnology wasn’t recognized as a separate discipline.

A lot of people don’t like Drexler. They argue that he is arrogant, brittle, or lazy, that he hasn’t done any real science. Maybe so, but nevertheless, he has already left an impressive legacy.