You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.
K. Eric Drexler

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

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

I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else.
K. Eric Drexler

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.
K. Eric Drexler

But if we can manage it so people don't have things forced on them that they don't want, I think there's every reason to believe things can settle out in a situation that is recognizably better than the one we're stuck in today.
K. Eric Drexler

It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits.
K. Eric Drexler

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