Robert Freitas | |
|---|---|
 Robert at Zyvex in 2002 | |
| Born | Robert A. Freitas Jr. 1952 (age 71–72) Camden, Maine, U.S. |
| Education | Harvey Mudd College (BSc) Santa Clara University School of Law (JD) |
| Occupation | Nanotechnologist |
| Spouse | Nancy (m. 1974) |
| Awards | Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (2009) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Nanotechnology |
| Website | www |
Robert A. Freitas Jr. (born 1952) is an American nanotechnologist.
Freitas was born in Camden, Maine. His father worked in agriculture and his mother was a homemaker. Freitas married Nancy, his childhood sweetheart in 1974. [1]
In 1974, Freitas earned a bachelor's degree in both physics and psychology from Harvey Mudd College, and in 1978, he received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the Santa Clara University School of Law. He has written more than 150 technical papers, book chapters, and popular articles on scientific, engineering, and legal topics. [2]
Freitas interests include nanorobotics, [3] how nanotechnology can extend the life of humans, [4] self-replicating machines, [5] and Cryonics. [1]
Freitas introduced the concept of "sentience quotient" in the late 1970s. [6]
In 1980, Freitas and William Gilbreath were participants in a NASA study regarding "Advanced Automation for Space Missions", [7] and they presented the feasibility of self-replicating machines in space, using advanced artificial intelligence and automation technologies. [8] [9]
Freitas began writing his Nanomedicine book series in 1994. [10] Volume I, published in October 1999 by Landes Bioscience while Freitas was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Volume IIA was published in October 2003 by Landes Bioscience. [11]
In 2004, Freitas and Ralph Merkle coauthored and published Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, a comprehensive survey of the field of physical and hypothetical self-replicating machines. [12]
In 2009, Freitas was awarded the Feynman Prize [13] in theoretical nanotechnology. Afterwards, he was granted the first patent for a Mechanosynthesis tool which he developed while working at Zyvex. The tool is theoretically to be used in molecular engineering. [14] [15]
The Foresight Institute (Foresight) is a San Francisco-based research non-profit that promotes the development of nanotechnology and other emerging technologies, such as safe AGI, biotech and longevity.
Kim Eric Drexler is an American engineer best known for introducing molecular nanotechnology (MNT), and his studies of its potential from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992. He has been called the "godfather of nanotechnology".
Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) is a technology based on the ability to build structures to complex, atomic specifications by means of mechanosynthesis. This is distinct from nanoscale materials.
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). At this scale, commonly known as the nanoscale, surface area and quantum mechanical effects become important in describing properties of matter. This definition of nanotechnology includes all types of research and technologies that deal with these special properties. It is common to see the plural form "nanotechnologies" as well as "nanoscale technologies" to refer to research and applications whose common trait is scale. An earlier understanding of nanotechnology referred to the particular technological goal of precisely manipulating atoms and molecules for fabricating macroscale products, now referred to as molecular nanotechnology.
Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology. Nanomedicine ranges from the medical applications of nanomaterials and biological devices, to nanoelectronic biosensors, and even possible future applications of molecular nanotechnology such as biological machines. Current problems for nanomedicine involve understanding the issues related to toxicity and environmental impact of nanoscale materials.
Ralph C. Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.
Self-replication is any behavior of a dynamical system that yields construction of an identical or similar copy of itself. Biological cells, given suitable environments, reproduce by cell division. During cell division, DNA is replicated and can be transmitted to offspring during reproduction. Biological viruses can replicate, but only by commandeering the reproductive machinery of cells through a process of infection. Harmful prion proteins can replicate by converting normal proteins into rogue forms. Computer viruses reproduce using the hardware and software already present on computers. Self-replication in robotics has been an area of research and a subject of interest in science fiction. Any self-replicating mechanism which does not make a perfect copy (mutation) will experience genetic variation and will create variants of itself. These variants will be subject to natural selection, since some will be better at surviving in their current environment than others and will out-breed them.
Gray goo is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building many more of themselves, a scenario that has been called ecophagy(the literal consumption of the ecosystem). The original idea assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this capability by accident.
A molecular assembler, as defined by K. Eric Drexler, is a "proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision". A molecular assembler is a kind of molecular machine. Some biological molecules such as ribosomes fit this definition. This is because they receive instructions from messenger RNA and then assemble specific sequences of amino acids to construct protein molecules. However, the term "molecular assembler" usually refers to theoretical human-made devices.
Mechanosynthesis is a term for hypothetical chemical syntheses in which reaction outcomes are determined by the use of mechanical constraints to direct reactive molecules to specific molecular sites. There are presently no non-biological chemical syntheses which achieve this aim. Some atomic placement has been achieved with scanning tunnelling microscopes.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, most often referred to as Alcor, is an American nonprofit, federally tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization based in Scottsdale, Arizona, United States. Alcor advocates for, researches, and performs cryonics, the freezing of human corpses and brains in liquid nitrogen after legal death, with hopes of resurrecting and restoring them to full health if the technology to do so becomes available in the future. Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the scientific community and has been characterized as quackery and pseudoscience.
Nanoid robotics, or for short, nanorobotics or nanobotics, is an emerging technology field creating machines or robots, which are called nanorobots or simply nanobots, whose components are at or near the scale of a nanometer. More specifically, nanorobotics refers to the nanotechnology engineering discipline of designing and building nanorobots with devices ranging in size from 0.1 to 10 micrometres and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components. The terms nanobot, nanoid, nanite, nanomachine and nanomite have also been used to describe such devices currently under research and development.
A self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced and examined by Homer Jacobson, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler in his book on nanotechnology, Engines of Creation and by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in their review Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines which provided the first comprehensive analysis of the entire replicator design space. The future development of such technology is an integral part of several plans involving the mining of moons and asteroid belts for ore and other materials, the creation of lunar factories, and even the construction of solar power satellites in space. The von Neumann probe is one theoretical example of such a machine. Von Neumann also worked on what he called the universal constructor, a self-replicating machine that would be able to evolve and which he formalized in a cellular automata environment. Notably, Von Neumann's Self-Reproducing Automata scheme posited that open-ended evolution requires inherited information to be copied and passed to offspring separately from the self-replicating machine, an insight that preceded the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick and how it is separately translated and replicated in the cell.
The history of nanotechnology traces the development of the concepts and experimental work falling under the broad category of nanotechnology. Although nanotechnology is a relatively recent development in scientific research, the development of its central concepts happened over a longer period of time. The emergence of nanotechnology in the 1980s was caused by the convergence of experimental advances such as the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981 and the discovery of fullerenes in 1985, with the elucidation and popularization of a conceptual framework for the goals of nanotechnology beginning with the 1986 publication of the book Engines of Creation. The field was subject to growing public awareness and controversy in the early 2000s, with prominent debates about both its potential implications as well as the feasibility of the applications envisioned by advocates of molecular nanotechnology, and with governments moving to promote and fund research into nanotechnology. The early 2000s also saw the beginnings of commercial applications of nanotechnology, although these were limited to bulk applications of nanomaterials rather than the transformative applications envisioned by the field.
The impact of nanotechnology extends from its medical, ethical, mental, legal and environmental applications, to fields such as engineering, biology, chemistry, computing, materials science, and communications.
Molecular biophysics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary area of research that combines concepts in physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and biology. It seeks to understand biomolecular systems and explain biological function in terms of molecular structure, structural organization, and dynamic behaviour at various levels of complexity. This discipline covers topics such as the measurement of molecular forces, molecular associations, allosteric interactions, Brownian motion, and cable theory. Additional areas of study can be found on Outline of Biophysics. The discipline has required development of specialized equipment and procedures capable of imaging and manipulating minute living structures, as well as novel experimental approaches.
The Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology is an award given by the Foresight Institute for significant advances in nanotechnology. Two prizes are awarded annually, in the categories of experimental and theoretical work. There is also a separate challenge award for making a nanoscale robotic arm and 8-bit adder.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to nanotechnology:
The Drexler–Smalley debate on molecular nanotechnology was a public dispute between K. Eric Drexler, the originator of the conceptual basis of molecular nanotechnology, and Richard Smalley, a recipient of the 1996 Nobel prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene. The dispute was about the feasibility of constructing molecular assemblers, which are molecular machines which could robotically assemble molecular materials and devices by manipulating individual atoms or molecules. The concept of molecular assemblers was central to Drexler's conception of molecular nanotechnology, but Smalley argued that fundamental physical principles would prevent them from ever being possible. The two also traded accusations that the other's conception of nanotechnology was harmful to public perception of the field and threatened continued public support for nanotechnology research.
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