Clinton on nanotech: "potential is breathtaking"

from the sounds-like-he-gets-it dept.
In an interview with Science posted at Yahoo, outgoing President Clinton said: "[Most] people still don't know what nanotechnology is. But if you combine the sequencing of the human gene and the capacity to identify genetic variations that lead to various kinds of cancers with the potential of nanotechnology, you get to the point where, in the imagination, you're identifying cancers when, assuming you have the screening technologies right, there are only a few cells coagulated together in this mutinous way, so that you raise the prospect of literally having 100 percent cure and prevention rate for every kind of cancer, which is something that would have been just unimaginable before…And I think the work we've done in nanotechnology in 10, 20 years from now will look very big, indeed. I just think that the potential of this is just breathtaking, and it will change even the way we think about things like calculation or what we're supposed to know how to do. It will — it's going to really, I think, have a huge and still under-appreciated impact on our understanding of human processes and our capacity to do things."