A member of our board of technical advisors, Dr. Roald Hoffmann recently sent us the following statement and encouraged us to post it to sci.nanotech:
NANOTECHNOLOGY
The first reaction is "I'm glad you guys (that includes women, of course) found a new name for *chemistry*. Now you have the incentive to learn what you didn't want to learn in college." Chemists have been practicing nanotechnology, structure and reactivity and properties, for two centuries, and for 50 years by design.
What is exciting about modern nanotechnology is (a) the marriage of chemical synthetic talent with a *direction* provided by "device-driven" ingenuity coming from engineering, and (b) a certain kind of *courage* provided by those incentives, to make arrays of atoms and molecules that ordinary, no, extraordinary chemists just wouldn't have thought of trying. Now they're pushed to do so.
And of course they will. They can do anything. Nanotechnology is the way of ingeniously controlling the building of small and large structures, with intricate properties; it is the way of the future, a way of precise, controlled building, with, incidentally, environmental benignness built in by design.
Roald Hoffmann
Steven C. Vetter <svetter@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Molecular Manufacturing Enterprises, Inc.
9653 Wellington Lane
Saint Paul, MN 55125 USA