Future Current

Tihamer Toth-Fejel is a senior research engineer at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. He is a member of the advisory board of the Nanoethics Group and chair of the Society for Manufacturing Engineers Nanomanufacturing Technical Group. At various times in the past he has been a fellow for the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and on the scientific advisory board of Nanorex Inc. At the At the CRN conference on the Future of Nano and Bio he went through various nanotechnology applications that could potentially be used together to build a nanofactory for molecular manufacturing.

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Ralph Merkle is a pioneer in public key cryptography and an expert on the emerging technological applications of molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. He is a key member of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, part of the Nanofactory Collaboration. In the popular science fiction novel The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, Dr. Merkle is portrayed as one of the heroes of a future civilization where nanotechnology is ubiquitous. At the CRN conference on the Future of Nano and Bio he spoke on the subject of “A Minimal Toolset for Diamond Mechanosynthesis,” a paper with Robert Freitas on molecular nanotechnology scheduled to be published in JCTN (Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience).

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Chris Phoenix is the co-founder and Director of Research of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. From 1991-97 he worked as an embedded software engineer for electronics for imaging, after which he left the software field to concentrate on dyslexia correction research. Since 2000 he has been studying and writing about molecular manufacturing, and gave a talk on the history and future of molecular nanotechnology at the 2007 CRN conference entitled “The Future of Bio & Nano Technologies.”

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In the 1980’s while a researcher at Rutgers doing artificial intelligence and computer architecture, J. Storrs Hall learned about Eric Drexler’s ideas and founded the sci.nanotech Usenet newsgroup, which he then moderated for over a decade. He is the inventor of various nanotech concepts, ranging from utility fog to space launch towers. The founding chief scientist of Nanorex Inc., he is a member of the Foresight Batelle productive nanosystems roadmap working group. He has also published the book Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology, which won the Foresight Institute’s communication prize in 2005. His latest book, which came out this summer, is Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. At the 2007 CRN conference entitled “The Future of Nano & Bio Technologies,” he went down the list from A to Z of things you could make with something called a “nanofactory.”

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James Van Ehr is the founder and chairman of Zyvex Performance Materials, Zyvex Instruments, Zyvex Labs and Zyvex Asia. He founded the Texas Nanotechnology Initiative and the Feynman Grand Prize in nanotechnology and his $3.5 million grant established at the University of Texas at Dallas NanoTech Institute. He has also endowed the James Van Ehr Distinguished Chair of Science and Technology at the University of Texas at Dallas held by the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Alan G. MacDiarmid.  At CRN’s conference on the Future of Nano and Bio, he spoke to the challenges and opportunities attending the commercialization of nanotechnology.

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Brian Wang is a long-time futurist listed as a Big Thinker on the Kurzweil AI website. A member of the CRN Task Force and an advisor to the Nanoethics Group and the Lifeboat Foundation, he has a column on the Nanotechnology Now website and his own blog Advanced Nanotechnolgy. He has a degree in computer science and an MBA and has worked in the IT industry for twenty years. He created and ran his own professional computer consulting company with offices in Canada and the U.S. and clients in the U.S. and Europe. For the last eleven years he has lived in the Bay Area, where he has been in touch with the technological changes in computer science and nanotechnology. His talk at the CRN Future of Nano & Bio Conference was entitled “Economics in a New Era.”

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