The more parts needed for a machine, the harder it is to make it smaller. Miniaturisation is such a vital part of the computer industry, and the best human minds are constantly working at it. And though miniaturised motors would be very useful, e.g. for unblocking clogged arteries and blood cleaning, the number of parts makes it difficult to make them below a certain size. But ingenious scientists are making them smaller all the time. However the design in living organisms has far exceeded our most painstaking efforts.
Bacteria propel themselves using flagella , filaments propelled by a true rotary motor.
This motor is only the size of a virus, thus far smaller than anything man-made. Yet it can rotate at over 1000 times per second. But even this impressively tiny motor is not the tiniest in God s creation. In a paper published in March 1997, Hiroyuki Noji et al. directly observed the rotation of the enzyme F 1 -ATPase , a subunit of a larger enzyme, ATP synthase . This had been suggested as the mechanism for the enzyme s operation by Paul Boyer.