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and water.

This was innovative stuff - and way more exciting than anything else on the scientific horizon. An entire generation of nerds began grappling with this new "nano" concept.

In the fourteen years between 1977 and 1991, when MIT finally awarded him the first ever PhD in Molecular Nanotechnology, Drexler published some twenty technical and research papers including the landmark paper, "Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1981), six books including his thesis and in his popular 1986 book, "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology," his more technical book in 1991, "Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution," and three patents including one in 1986 for the Solar Sail - an innovative way to propel space craft throughout the solar system.

One of Drexler's early admirers was Richard F. Smalley, a chemist at Rice University. Smalley shared the Nobel Prize in 1996 (with Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Sir Harry W. Kroto) as the co-inventor of Buckminsterfullerene, a soccer ball-shaped group of carbon molecules popularly known as Buckyballs. In the Summer of 2005, Smalley told Ed Regis (the author of Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology) that "[In the early 1990s] I was enchanted by Engines of Creation. I read it in a single sitting, and then I reread it." In 1999, Smalley testified to Congress about "what will be possible when we learn to build things at the ultimate level of control, one atom at a time."

With time, however, Smalley came to believe that Drexler's concept was scientifically impossible. Drexler had warned that nanotechnology could be misused with disastrous consequences for humankind - brought into sharp focus by Michael Crichton's best-selling book, "Prey," wherein a lab accidentally releases a nanoparticle swarm. The particles eventually sweep across the Nevada desert causing havoc and mayhem, with the potential for destroying all life on Earth.

In May 2003, the House of Representatives passed (by a 405 to 19 vote) the Nanotechnology Research and Development Act for which Drexler had lobbied long and hard for several years. Before the bill got to the Senate in November, however, Smalley and friends stepped up to the plate. Drexler had always been the nerd's nerd, socially inept, and politically nave. Smalley, on the other hand, was the paragon of scientific sophistication - a smooth-talking, hand-shaking,

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