Molecular robots on the move

摘要

The idea of tiny machines that can execute complex functions has been a mainstay of science fiction for many decades. In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage (Fig. 1), a micrometre-sized shrunken submarine is injected into a human to find and destroy a life-threatening blood clot; and in Michael Crichton's 2002 novel Prey, swarming nano-robotic devices threaten global destruction. Such events remain a fantasy, but 'nanobots' are not so far-fetched. In this issue, two papers1'2 describe the latest steps in attempts to implement an autonomous, programmable molecular robot.