a mere new-born; clearly it must develop a great deal before it can hope to challenge its predecessors. In at least one sense, though, Wisdomism already has an edge. The answers to all moral questions, even those that ask what (if any) moral theory we should adopt, demand the one thing that this theory promises to best provide: wisdom.

(Though this article was written as a rebuttal of Max’s own views, he has lent a great deal of his own wisdom to its writing. More than just thanking him, I would like to tell him that he has acted morally - though as an amoralist he must refuse the latter accolade!)

NANOTECH NEWS

Reported by Max T. O’Connor

Nanotechnology was unheard of just a few years ago. The word had not been coined and almost no one had thought of the idea except for the great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman. In a 1959 talk before the American Physical Society entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” Feynman introduced the possibility of nanotechnology. Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his foundational work in molecular technology, unfortunately died in February 1988, missing the startling innovations that are to come from his ideas. In this first nanotech news update I will first very briefly explain what nanotechnology is for those who don’t know, and then describe some recent advances in molecular-scale memory devices.

‘Nano’ is a prefix which means a one-billionth part. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter (or a millionth of a millimeter). To place this in perspective: atoms are generally 0.1 to 0.3 nanometers in diameter; a glucose molecule is just under 1 nanometer; and an average human cell is 10,000 nanometers. Nanotechnology involves the manipulation of matter right down at the atomic level and the building of machines and computers at that scale. It will allow us to build anything to exact specifications and with perfect quality by the use of molecular assemblers. We will control these molecular devices via nanocomputers, which will be only a few cubic nanometers in size and will use ultra-fast molecular tape memories instead of integrated circuits.

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Nanotechnology can remove every bit of pollution from the atmosphere, giving us back crystal-pure air at last. It can build anything we want virtually cost free, move through our bodies destroying harmful viruses, fat deposits, and cancers and maintaining us in perfect health, revive cryonic suspension patients from biostasis, and construct entire colonies in space or other planets ready for us to move into. Most nanotechnology is currently theoretical, involving ‘exploratory engineering’ and is only just beginning to be widely discussed. Eric Drexler, author of the nanotech classic Engines of Creation, moved from MIT to Stanford in 1987 to teach the first course in the subject. Figures like Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and MIT’s Donner Professor of Science Marvin Minsky back up nanotechnology’s potential. The increasing number of symposia are held in this new field by corporations as respectable as IBM, and last year’s Fine Particle Society Convention was dominated by discussions of molecular electronics instead of its more usual pedestrian fare.

An excellent popular article in the November 1988 issue of California magazine reported on a breakthrough in the beginnings of real, concrete nanotechnology. The accidental breakthrough took place in January 1987 at a high-security lab near San Jose. It happened while IBM physicist John Foster and his colleagues Jane Frommer and Patrick Arnett were trying to find an image under a microscope that is capable of resolving images at the molecular level. In trying to remove some unwanted molecules from the tip of a very fine tungsten wire by sending some electricity through it, Foster found that he had apparently dislodged a single molecule of dioctyl phtalate and attached it to the graphite surface. It was early 1988, almost a year since that accident, before they were able to duplicate the feat. Pictures of it were taken, one of which was published in Nature, and ‘the last technological revolution’ began. It will probably be decades until mature nanotechnology arrives with its general assemblers and nanocomputers, but from now on we will see an accelerating series of advances in the field, reports of which will be printed in this magazine.

One such recent advance was reported in the Wall Street Journal on September 13, 1988. The prototypes of computer chips with working parts made of individual molecules have almost arrived, although the researchers say that computers based on this advance won’t be available for years. While we have yet to achieve single-molecule computing, there are now ways of performing basic logic operations with groups of about a thousand molecules, and this will push miniaturization far beyond its current state. At Syracuse University lasers are being used to change molecules’ shapes in order to store information, and a group at MIT is building miniscule transistors made of organic molecules.

In August 1988, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, put forward a detailed plan for a molecular memory device which could be built with existing technology. Since computers are limited by switching speeds, and molecules can perform on-off switching 1,000 times faster than current computer chips, we can look forward to big increases in computing speed and power. Researchers have proposed several ways to use molecules as on-off switches. Robert Birge’s group at

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