Ralph Merkle Quotations

A molecular manufacturing technology will let us build molecular surgical tools, and those tools will, for the first time, let us directly address the problems at the very root level.

Food is available, but it cannot be shipped into an area, so the people in that area suffer the consequences.

The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.

Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.

Lighter computers and lighter sensors would let you have more function in a given weight, which is very important if you are launching things into space, and you have to pay by the pound to put things there.

We can grow crops less expensively because molecular manufacturing technology is inherently low cost.

If we attempt to block the development of new technology, we effectively have ensured that the most responsible parties will not develop them.

Machines built by human beings they will function correctly if we provide them with a very specific environment. But if that environment is changed, they won't function at all.

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.