Word: drexler
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...only look at his MVP trophy from that season for consolation. In 1996, after contemplating retirement due to an aching back, he decided to give it one more try, this time going to the Rockets where he hoped he could put it all together with Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler...
Space and time are relative. Our behavior is ruled by our subconscious mind. The most powerful machines are built one atom at a time. When the history of human civilization is rewritten a few centuries hence, the name Eric Drexler just might appear alongside those of Einstein and Freud. Drexler, 43, is the founding father of nanotechnology, the idea of using individual atoms and molecules to build practical machines...
...Drexler was an M.I.T. undergraduate studying genetic engineering in the mid-1970s when he had his epiphany: if you could engineer DNA on a molecular level, why not build machines out of atoms, program them to build more machines and so on, until you had millions of infinitesimal nanobots, endlessly restocking the food supply, say, or swarming through the bloodstream eradicating disease, or building skyscrapers from industrial waste? If nanotech was viable, it promised a gleaming future of virtually limitless wealth and endlessly renewable resources...
That's an immense if. Drexler's idea was initially dismissed as science fiction, but even skeptics admit that, unlike time travel and warp drives, nothing about it actually violates the laws of physics. And when in 1989 an IBM team famously spelled the Big Blue logo in xenon atoms, nanotech spread from the basements of feverish acolytes poring over Drexler's seminal book, Engines of Creation (1986), to the research labs of NASA and Xerox PARC. Today nanotech researchers speak not of if but of when. Great leaps forward come from thinking outside the box. Drexler may be remembered...
...Drexler's defense is likely to turn on questions of whether the baby was alive at birth and the mother's state of mind. Defense expert Margaret Spinelli, Ph.D., a New York City psychologist who has studied women who hide their pregnancies and sometimes kill their infants, refuses to discuss specifics of Drexler's case but answers the "How could she?" question in general terms. Most such women, she says, "describe things like watching themselves deliver from across the room." Dissociation can become so intense that some women deny their pregnancies even to themselves. "When they deliver, the pregnancy...