The Molecular Economy
| Author | David Rejeski |
| Position | Directs the Science, Technology, and Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center |
| Pages | 36-41 |
Page 36 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Jan./Feb. 2010
co v e r sT o r y
In 1813, a Connecticut arms manufacturer
named Simeon North received a contract to
produce 20,000 handguns such that “the com-
ponent parts of the pistols are to correspond so
exactly that any limb or part of one pistol may
be fitted to any other pistol.” To accomplish that
task, North replaced the slow, tedious, and im-
perfect process of hand filing with a milling machine.
e advent of interchangeable parts produced a revo-
lution in manufacturing. Slowly the diffusion of ma-
chine tools and precision techniques, along with the
speed of the assembly line, spread from arms making
to other economic sectors, changing how we manufac-
ture everything from sewing machines to bicycles and
eventually the automobile and the computer.
e story of the Industrial Revolution is a story
about process control — about making things with
ever greater precision in less and less time. is mass
manufacturing was what helped Henry Ford put a car
in every garage at the beginning of the 20th century
and, by the beginning of the 21st century, enabled
semiconductor manufacturers to pack a billion transis-
tors onto a silicon wafer smaller than a postage stamp.
Of course manufacturing systems that produced cars
and chips also produced nasty byproducts, and the his-
tory of environmental law has been a catchup game
of regulating these harms after they are produced. As
culture historian C. P. Snow once put it, “Technology
. . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one
hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” Can
a new Industrial Revolution avoid these polluting by-
products? Can it help us clean up the detritus of the
first Industrial Revolution?
roughout most of the 19th century, there was a
revolution occuring inside the factories and armories in
New England. Twenty-five miles from the old mills of
Lowell, Massachusetts, relics of the Industrial Revolu-
tion’s triumph of technology and, later, toxic tragedies,
sits Angela Belcher’s squeaky-clean laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She and her col-
leagues are part of a new guild of craftsmen engineering
manufacturing at a Lilliputian scale. ey are building
parts for highly efficient rechargeable batteries by using
viruses that have been engineered to coat themselves
with iron and then attach to ultra-thin carbon wires
to form a conductive network. Across the country, in
Berkeley, California, chemical engineer Jay Keasling
has created a cellular factory using modified yeast that
produces artemisinin, a key ingredient in the drug used
to treat malaria. Other researchers are creating custom
microbes that will allow highly efficient production of
biofuels from a wide variety of feedstocks.
e Molecular
Economy
Pretty much as predicted, the long
awaited convergence of nanotechnology
and biotechnology has arrived. Can
environmental protection, still cleaning
up the last Industrial Revolution, avoid
the perils while realizing the promises of
manufacturing at an atomic scale?
David Rejeski
David Reje ski di rects the Scienc e,
Techn ology, and Inn ovation Pro gram
at the Woodrow Wilson Cen ter. He w as
recently a member of the E PA Science
Advisory Bo ard and sits on the Advisory
Committee for Environmental Res earch
and Edu cation at the National Science
Foundation.
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