More Words, Deeper Hole

Yeah, Drexler is pretty much out of the running. Personal problems and some stubbornness/willed ignorance. (When Nobel Prize-winning chemists suggest you have made a mistake in your proposed molecular design, you might want to take them at their word.) As a result, 'nanotechnology' in the real world means something very different from what Drexler proposed.

(There's a whole strange subclass of MIT-affiliated whoopsies like that. Norbert Wiener's wife claiming McCulloch seduced their daughter, setting back cybernetics a decade. Minsky and Papert stomping on perceptrons, setting back neural net research a decade. Chomsky and linguistics, setting back linguistics two, three decades. Various Media Lab things.)

For a neologism, might I suggest "artificial biochemistry"?

Carlos