My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

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.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

K. Eric Drexler Quotes