Paul McEuen Quotes

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

Life is nanotechnology that works.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.

I imagine a day, some time in the not too distant future when children and teenagers will be able to create their own genetically engineered machines, cure the diseases of the old and find new ways to build and extend the capabilities of humanity, moving from programming software to programing the physical world, through biology.

The fact that natural selection and evolution crafted essentially carbon and water into a mechanism that can think and be conscious means there's nothing in physics that says you cannot do that to a greater degree.

Evolution is the phenomenon of change and the challenge of the next time cycle will involve the creation of constructs that will provide the kind of dynamic knowledge base that can assist the challenges of tomorrow (involving both fundamental and extended information).

The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.

Not too many people in cocktail parties are aware of Bioprinting and growing organs, or the coming technological singularity; I've seen very little philosophical speculation about how far we can go, how much we could achieve.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

A fly with a brain the size of a salt grain has the behavioral repertoire nearly as complex as a much larger animal such as a mouse. That's a super-interesting problem from an engineering perspective.

I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.

From a personal perspective, I am disappointed that we have yet to really achieve a full understanding of the origins of life on Earth. What was the spark that, billions of years ago, kickstarted the process of evolution that has brought us life as we know it today? I hope that we will get some answers to that in my lifetime.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.

We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make - 'derive' - and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

Technologies that exist between man and nature in a simple form and those that enable the interaction with other technologies are becoming significantly more complex and create their own information systems.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.