derek@shorty.cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) (07/23/90)
I found the following tidbit in the Winter 1990 _Extropy_: "In view of the unexpectedly rapid breakthrough in the protein- folding problem (achieved by Bill DelGrotto's group at DuPont), Drexler has revised downwards his estimate for the availability of general molecular assemblers to LESS THAN 30 YEARS." Does anybody out there know specifically what the "breakthrough" was? A reference? Thanks. derek [This sounds like the design and synthesis of the alpha-4 protein. Basically it turns out to be much easier to design stable proteins than to figure out naturally occuring ones. You might expect this if you compared the process of writing a program to that of figuring out a string of machine code which had been formed by randomly flipping bits until it did the same task... --JoSH]