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.
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.
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.
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.
Limonene has been around forever, carbon dioxide as well. What we've been able to do is devise this catalyst for the first time that allows these two small molecules to come together to make a plastic,
During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.
I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'
A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed not unlikely that the phenomenon owed its origin to the scattering of sunlight by the molecules of the water.
The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.
The fundamental importance of the subject of molecular diffraction came first to be recognized through the theoretical work of the late Lord Rayleigh on the blue light of the sky, which he showed to be the result of the scattering of sunlight by the gases of the atmosphere.