K. Eric Drexler

Kim Eric Drexler (born April 25, 1955) is an American engineer best known for popularizing the potential of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), from the 1970s and 1980s. His 1991 doctoral thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was revised and published as the book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery Manufacturing and Computation (1992), which received the Association of American Publishers award for Best Computer Science Book of 1992.

Life and work

K. Eric Drexler was strongly influenced by ideas on Limits to Growth in the early 1970s. His response in his first year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to seek out someone who was working on extraterrestrial resources. He found Gerard K. O'Neill of Princeton University, a physicist famous for his work on storage rings for particle accelerators and his landmark work on the concepts of space colonization.

Drexler participated in NASA summer studies on space colonies in 1975 and 1976. He fabricated metal films a few tens of nanometers thick on a wax support to demonstrate the potentials of high performance solar sails. He was active in space politics, helping the L5 Society defeat the Moon Treaty in 1980.