Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of Nanotechnology

This article re-examines claims made around nanotechnology early in its conception in order to retrospectively highlight questions at the core of that discourse that remain relevant today. Early nanotechnology rhetoric paradoxically invokes the capacities of microbes as proof of concept, even as nanoscientists dream of creating far more complex modes of building and intervention at the nanoscale. This article traces this contradictory trope through the history of nanotechnology, including a reading of Drexler’s Engines of Creation, Feynman’s “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” the Drexler–Smalley debate, and the idea of “self-assembly.” I demonstrate how microbial capacities bring into view but also cover over questions about the nature of technological control, how we define life, and what is possible at the nanoscale. Throughout, the dreams of precise control at the nanoscale are contrasted to an alternative vision presented by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan that also situates microbes as technological but does so to present a vision that reworks or even displaces human control.