Nanotechnology in medicine is going to have a major impact on the survival of the human race.
In 1998, I set up and directed a research group at the Nanotechnology Institute newly created in the Research Center of Karlsruhe. This allowed to offer to former post-doctoral coworkers the opportunity to develop and to progressively set up independent research activities in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
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.
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.
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.
I think gene therapy and nanotechnology go hand in hand.
Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower.
Nanotechnology is the idea that we can create devices and machines all the way down to the nanometer scale, which is a billionth of a meter, about half the width of a human DNA molecule.
People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.
The pace and demands in any field, be it genetics, nanotechnology or cosmology, can only be met with increased international cooperation and collaborative projects.
