Molecular Engineering Quotes

For me, each day begins and ends with wanting to learn a little more about the secrets of spider silk.

If we are ever to cross the 100-nano barrier in electronics, we need to develop nano structures that let electrons move through, as they do through wires and semiconductors. And these structures must survive in the real world of air, water, boiling temperatures.

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.

I would say that nanotech's worth paying attention to no matter what your background because if you look far enough into the future, it'll impact just about any industry you can think of.

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.

When a nanotech company matures and becomes a real business, it becomes something else. It becomes a biotech company or a cleantech company or a memory chip company. Nanotechnology has fueled the core innovations in electronics and energy.

When I understood the rudiments of what nanotech was all about, I knew I wanted to participate.

Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.

Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

Graphene is dead; long live graphene.

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.

Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn't believe.

It turned out that the buckyball, the soccer ball, was something of a Rosetta stone of an infinite new class of molecules.

As soon as we can wrest from Nature the secret of the internal structure of the compounds produced by her, chemical science can then even surpass Nature by producing compounds as variations of the natural ones, which the living cell is unable to construct.

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.

The holy grail would be to turn a knob, and out comes the nanotube of the right diameter and chirality.

My feeling is that if a human being can coax life to build bonds between silicon and carbon, nature can do it too.

What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.

I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.

What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?

To the field of synthetic chemistry belongs an array of responsibilities which are crucial for the future of mankind, not only with regard to the health and needs of our society, but also for the attainment of a deep understanding of matter, chemical change, and life.