Re: Nanomedicine & Foresight conf.
Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Wed, 20 Oct 1999 19:23:35 -0700 (PDT)
On Wed, 20 Oct 1999 hal@finney.org wrote:
> Expected publication date is listed as November.
>
> http://www.landesbioscience.com/freitas.html
>
> The book is listed at $89 from both sellers.
Hal, thanks for this information!
If you are *really* hot to get a copy you should contact the Stanford
Bookstore. They were doing the sales at the Foresight Conf. and
sent the unsold copies (~30?) back to the bookstore. They said they
didn't expect they would last long. There may even be a couple
of R.F. autographed copies in the batch.
I got my 2 hard-copies (one for Seattle & one for Moscow) as well
as one I had Robert sign that I'm sending to Ron Klatz at the A4M
(... selling, cajoling, advertising, educating our way into the
future...).
It turns out Ralph M. managed to get a few more citations in NM
than I did but he *did* help initiate the writing of the book...
But in Volume 2, I'm sure I'll correct this inequity.
[#2 tries harder...] :-)
>
> BTW did anyone here attend the Foresight Conference on nanotech last
> weekend? How was it?
>
It was good, though nothing that made me fall out of my chair.
The best things to my mind were:
- The Cornell group seems to have the parts for a "system"
of light powered biotech-motor driven liposome-bots.
- The Stanford people seem to have a good handle on growing
nanotubes using CVD.
- There is a NASA Ames group working on defining the parts of
an artificial self-replicating "biosystem" (presumably
a few dozen enzymes with a protein or RNA thread serving
as the genome). This is the "bottom-up" approach that is
the inverse of the Ventner/TIGR "top-down" approach to
determining the minimal bacterial genome.
- A couple of groups keep cranking up the atomistic simulations.
With access to DoD computers they can now do millions of atoms.
They still have some work to do with resolving what happens
when they "jump" scales (change mathematical models).
- The AFM "NanoPen" lithography approach looks *very* good.
Instead of having to have a high vacuum chamber and ultra
clean surfaces, they just use the humidity to control the
volume of water on the AFM tip and the hydrophobicity of the ink
to write larger or smaller lines. Very interesting stuff since
they are writing single-molecule layers from 15-70 nm wide.
The best part was they use a humidifier they purchased from Home Depot.
You can check the Foresight program for the abstracts. If you
need any more details let me know.
The worst thing was:
- The Government people still don't get it. I was a little kinder
this year and spoke with the DARPA people one-on-one (intead of
putting them on the spot like I did with the fellow from the Navy
last year). They *still* don't get that you can grow an Aircraft
Carrier in 4 days. I suppose that this is good since if they
really got it, they would probably be trying to bury it. So
in their "ignorance" they are funding a number of Molelectronics
efforts that stand a pretty good chance of getting us molecular
computers (perhaps within 5-10 years).
There was lots of stuff on nanotubes and my general conclusion is that
there needs to be a fair amount of work done to reconcile the properties
measurements as computed and the experimental measurments.
Interestingly, Eric was notably absent except from the FI Senior
Associates reception [gossip, whisper, ...].
Robert