This interview was conducted both on site in San Francisco and on the Internet. BC Crandall is the founder and director of Molecular Realities and the founder and president of Memetic Engineering.
Molecular engineering is the art of making objects with molecular precision.
The field is called nanotechnology because simple molecular components are measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. For the past two hundred years, chemists have done rather simple things with a large number of relatively small molecules. Nanotechnology aims to build a wide range of quite complex micro- and macroscopic objects with molecular precision. For perspective, consider DNA, which is 2.3 nanometers wide, or LSD, one of the larger psychically active molecules, made up of some 50 atoms, which is about one nanometer across. The field is just emerging from the coalescing efforts of genetic engineers, chip manufacturers, and research scientists pushing around individual atoms with their scanning probe microscopes to make raked-gravel Japanese gardens with atoms and their electrons.