I think this was first written about at length in the book ‘Soft Machines’, which is a really good critique of some of the nanotechnology thinking at the time. I highly recommend the book.
Actually it was a terrible critique of nanotechnology, which doesn’t try to make things the same way as biology. But a good overview of the funkiness which comes part and parcel with life’s microbiology.
Not sure which field of bionanotechnology (I assume you meant bionanotechnology ) you work in, but for the one I work in, the metaphor of biology and computer science is extremely intertwined—like very explicitly. Circuits, computation, the whole nine yards. If you’re talking about graphene or something that is an entirely different field. I can’t see how this book was a terrible critique of bionanotechnology—or at least an excellent discussion of the hardships faced.
I did not mean bionanotechnology, and neither did Smalley. He offered that as a critique against Drexlar’s diamondoid molecular manufacturing, in a successful political coup to claim the billions in research dollars that were promised as part of the National Nanotechnology Initiative.
Because of Richard Smalley that money went towards material science and chemical research instead of the molecular manufacturing it was promised for. Even though, as you point out, in terms of fact the critique only applied to life-like bionanotechnology.
The history of this is laid out pretty well—with a surprisingly minimal amount of sour grapes—in Drexler‘s book Radical Abundance.
