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.

After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

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.

K. Eric Drexler Quotes