After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

Any powerful technology can be abused.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.
- K. Eric Drexler Quote