"Humanity, get down on your knees", scream the billboards advertising "Prey", the latest novel by Michael Crichton, author of "Jurassic Park". The horrible beasties threatening humanity in this new thriller are not giant dinosaurs, but swarms of minute "nanobots" that can invade and take control of human bodies. Nanobots are putative machines with working parts that are smaller than 100 nanometres (billionths of a metre). A film is, inevitably, in the offing. And to increase the impending nano-horror, the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy, is due next autumn to publish a book fleshing out his own nano-Luddite views. In an article in Wired two years ago, Mr Joy pleaded for a moratorium on all nanotech-nology research.
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