The Bright Future of Molecular Nanotechnology At the cellular level, today's biomedical technologies are crude and destructive. Even the most delicate surgery does not solve medical problems. Surgical methods rip out huge swatches of both damaged and healthy cells and rely on the body's ability to heal itself. Today's drugs are developed by trial and error at a cost of millions of dollars and disperse throughout the body, causing numerous side effects in tissues unaffected by the initial physiological insult the drug was intended to correct. Today's genetic screening can determine whether a patient's genome contains specific aberrant genes, but it can neither determine whether these genes will cause true diseases nor effectively treat these genetic diseases. Current experimental gene therapy attempts involve weakened viral strains or poorly understood biological mechanisms to introduce the correct DNA into the body and solve the problem. All these biomedical difficulties are caused by one simple problem: size. Humans are simply too large to function effectively on a cellular scale. The tools we have developed to work in this field were developed by trial and error, as with most pharmaceuticals, or stolen from nature. Nature contains many wonderful tools for working on this scale, but nature is the product of billions of years of random and reckless evolution, and the available tools exist because they work well enough for the systems in which they evolved, not because they are optimal . tools for the jobs humans would like them to do. But this deficiency in the human toolbox may soon be challenged by a controversial new ideal known as molecular nanotechnology. The September 2001 issue of Scientific American is dedicated to the developing field of nanotechnology, and their web page has an entire section containing numerous articles they have published on the topic. Nanotechnology is the umbrella term used to describe the precision manufacturing of materials and structures with characteristics below 100 nm and, ultimately, to build molecular-sized structures in which cells and life operate. Inside the magazine there are numerous articles that describe the state of the art today and some considerations on future possibilities. The most important article on future possibilities is titled "Machine-Phase Nanotechnology" by K. Eric Drexler, immediately followed by an article condemning the tools he proposed. Drexler's article describes the basics of advanced nanotechnology in layman's terms..