K. Eric Drexler was strongly influenced by ideas on
limits to growth in the early 1970s. During his first year at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he sought out someone who was working on
extraterrestrial resources. He found
Gerard K. O'Neill of
Princeton University, a physicist famous for his work on
storage rings for
particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of
space colonization. Drexler participated in NASA summer studies on space colonies in 1975 and 1976. He fabricated metal
thin films a few tens of nanometers thick on a wax support to demonstrate the potentials of high-performance
solar sails. He was active in
space politics, helping the
L5 Society defeat the
Moon Treaty in 1980. Besides working summers for O'Neill, building
mass driver prototypes, Drexler delivered papers at the first three
Space Manufacturing conferences at Princeton. The 1977 and 1979 papers were co-authored with
Keith Henson, and patents were issued on both subjects, vapor phase fabrication and space radiators. During the late 1970s, Drexler began to develop ideas about
molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In 1979, he encountered
Richard Feynman's provocative 1959 talk "
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom". In 1981, Drexler wrote a seminal research article, published by
PNAS, "Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation". This article has continued to be cited, more than 620 times, during the following 35 years. The term "
nano-technology" had been coined by the
Tokyo University of Science professor
Norio Taniguchi in 1974 to describe the precision manufacture of materials with nanometer tolerances, and Drexler unknowingly used a related term in his 1986 book
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology to describe what later became known as
molecular nanotechnology (MNT). In that book, he proposed the idea of a nanoscale "assembler" which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity. He also first published the term "
grey goo" to describe what might happen if a hypothetical self-replicating molecular assembler went out of control. He has subsequently tried to clarify his concerns about out-of-control self-replicators, and make the case that molecular manufacturing does not require such devices.
Education Drexler holds three degrees from
MIT. He received his
B.S. in Interdisciplinary Sciences in 1977 and his
M.S. in 1979 in
Astro/Aerospace Engineering with a master's thesis titled "Design of a High Performance Solar Sail System". In 1991, he earned a
Ph.D. through the
MIT Media Lab (formally, the Media Arts and Sciences Section, School of Architecture and Planning) after the department of
electrical engineering and
computer science refused to approve Drexler's plan of study. His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology and his thesis, "Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation", was published (with minor editing) as
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.
Personal life In 1981, Drexler married
Christine Peterson. The marriage ended in 2002. In 2006, Drexler married Rosa Wang, a former
investment banker who works with
Ashoka: Innovators for the Public on improving the
social capital markets. Drexler has arranged to be
cryonically preserved in the event of
legal death. ==Reception==