What a coincidence, I was just reading through Radical Abundance, Drexler's most recent popular work advocating for molecular nanotechnology (though he prefers the term "Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM)" now since he feels that nanotechnology is too broad). It is curious to note that, so far in my reading at least, he doesn't mention the failure of the DMS experiments in his chapter explaining why APM hasn't been developed nearly as quickly as he originally thought, chalking it up to a lack of interest in the field and the greater rewards on offer from solving more pressing materials science challenges.
To be fair though, his description of how bio-based self-assembly methods could be used to incrementally approach APM isn't quite how you characterised it, he describes an approach of creating hybrid tools that use mechanical control for coarser actions and self-assembly for fine actions, figuring out what works, then moving mechanical control down to an incrementally finer level and so on up a gradient of marginal improvements to mature APM systems. Now, that raises the question of if the practical chemistry issues you highlight will lead to some insurmountable barrier in that gradient or if they can be gotten around with better knowledge of the issues and more creative chemistries, and he's fairly agnostic on whether APM systems would be "diamondoid" based or use more complex chemistries to produce materials.
What a coincidence, I was just reading through Radical Abundance, Drexler's most recent popular work advocating for molecular nanotechnology (though he prefers the term "Atomically Precise Manufacturing (APM)" now since he feels that nanotechnology is too broad). It is curious to note that, so far in my reading at least, he doesn't mention the failure of the DMS experiments in his chapter explaining why APM hasn't been developed nearly as quickly as he originally thought, chalking it up to a lack of interest in the field and the greater rewards on offer from solving more pressing materials science challenges.
To be fair though, his description of how bio-based self-assembly methods could be used to incrementally approach APM isn't quite how you characterised it, he describes an approach of creating hybrid tools that use mechanical control for coarser actions and self-assembly for fine actions, figuring out what works, then moving mechanical control down to an incrementally finer level and so on up a gradient of marginal improvements to mature APM systems. Now, that raises the question of if the practical chemistry issues you highlight will lead to some insurmountable barrier in that gradient or if they can be gotten around with better knowledge of the issues and more creative chemistries, and he's fairly agnostic on whether APM systems would be "diamondoid" based or use more complex chemistries to produce materials.
Wow, thanks for this. Great read!