Drexler predicts 15 as his standard answer. Buckyballs in Support of Nanotechnology Nanotechnology is based on the assumption that humans can manuever atoms into new, desired structures. This assumption received support in 1985 when Richard Smalley led a group of scientists at Rice University in an experiment. The resulting carbon clusters reassembled themselves into a distinct, but previously unknown molecule of 60 carbon atoms. Smalley's crew named the molecule the buckminsterfullerene in honor of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes.
Buckyballs have many interesting properties,which scientists are still investigating.
Among these properties are new forms of electrical conduction, new semiconductor behavior, and possible new ways to manipulate radiotherapy agents. Richard Smalley, Robert Curl Jr., and Harold Kroto won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of their discovery of fullerenes. This positional assembly method will probably require molecular robots that can move the molecules around. Production costs must be reduced to commercially-acceptable levels by having molecular manufacturing systems not only build products, but construct other molecular manufacturing systems as well. Such a system is called a self-replicating system, and it works much like a piece of DNA building proteins.