“Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.”
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Any powerful technology can be abused.
My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.
You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.