Rhetoric heats up among nanotech researchers

from the it-can't-be-done-today-so-it-can't-be-done-ever dept.
Garrison Hamrick points out a Knight Ridder wire service story. Excerpts: "Meanwhile, Dr. Smalley, and many other academic scientists, say that basic research being done today doesn't reflect the original Engines of Creation vision. "I call it the silly side of nanotechnology," Dr. Smalley says. Dr. Vicki Colvin, another Rice researcher, adds that "to a chemist, the idea of a molecular assembler is anathema"…Harvard University chemist George Whitesides [argues] "We certainly cannot build a self-replicating robot at any size," he says. "The idea of building one on a nanometer scale does not make sense"…Dr. Evelyn Hu, an engineer at the University of California, Santa Barbara [opines] "I think what Drexler was talking about, what Richard Feynman was talking about," she says, "is a vision that is still ahead of us with all its positive, beneficial aspects and all its scary aspects." CP: It appears from the article that those attempting to critique the assembler concept are attacking a straw man, i.e. a proposal that no one is making. Note also that the engineer quoted has a sense of time; the others use the present tense only — typical.