Everything about Molecular Engineering totally explained
Molecular engineering is any means of manufacturing
molecules. It may be used to create, on an extremely small scale, most typically one at a time, new molecules which may not exist in nature, or be stable beyond a very narrow range of conditions.
Today this is an extremely difficult process, requiring manual manipulation of molecules using such devices as a
scanning tunneling microscope. Eventually it's expected to exploit life-like self-replicating 'helper molecules' that are themselves engineered. Thus the field can be seen as a precision form of
chemical engineering that includes
protein engineering, the creation of protein molecules, a process that occurs naturally in
biochemistry, for example,
prion reproduction. However, it provides far more control than
genetic modification of an existing
genome, which must rely strictly on existing biochemistry to express genes as proteins, and has little power to produce any non-proteins.
Molecular engineering is an important part of
pharmaceutical research and
materials science.
Emergence of scanning tunneling microscopes and
picosecond-burst lasers in the
1990s, plus discovery of new
carbon nanotube applications to motivate mass production of these custom molecules, drove the field forward to commercial reality in the
2000s.
As it matures, it's seeming to converge with
mechanical engineering, since the molecules being designed often resemble small machines. A general theory of molecular
mechanosynthesis to parallel that of
photosynthesis and
chemosynthesis (both used by living things) is the ultimate goal of the field. This may lead to a
molecular assembler, according to some, such as
K. Eric Drexler,
Ralph Merkle, and
Robert Freitas, and of the potential for integrating vast numbers of assemblers into a kg-scale
nanofactory.
Molecular engineering is sometimes called generically "
nanotechnology", in reference to the
nanometre scale at which its basic processes must operate. That term is considered to be vague, however, due to misappropriation of the word in association with other techniques, such as X-ray
lithography, that are not used to create new free-floating ions or molecules.
Future developments in molecular engineering hold out the promise of great benefits, as well as great risks. See the
nanotechnology article for an extensive discussion of the more speculative aspects of the technology. Of these, the one that sparks the most controversy is that of the
molecular assembler.
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