Cells And Biochemistry Are Wet Stochastic Nanosystems

Objectively speaking, cells, organelles, and their constituent molecules are nanomachines. They are agents with features operating at nanometer scales that perform processing, sorting, and transformation of matter toward predefined goals. They run on software that is genetic, epigenetic, or environmental, and possess hardware to execute their functions.

What is equally obvious, however, is that a significant portion of their work is achieved through statistical chance. Evaluated at the level of individual operations, a human engineer would hesitate to classify them as well-designed machines, which, by any reasonable definition, are systems that convert discrete inputs into quantized packets of work with very few errors. A cell and its organelles, viewed through that lens, look more like fault-tolerant systems with enormous surface area for failure. And yet the fact that they accomplish machine-like work at all is remarkable, and that alone makes them worthy of study for any nanotechnologist seeking to build machine-like nano-agents.

As later chapters of this work will show, biological cells and their components contain every category of part necessary to constitute a machine: rigid structural elements, nanoscale motion generators, force transmission components, and accessories for environmental sensing and chemical actuation. The task of the nanotechnologist is to strip these facilities down to their most essential parts and functions, hypothesize arrangements that yield a more deterministic nano-agent, and devise methods to manufacture and demonstrate the utility of that agent.

This, then, is where the work begins: the construction of cell-mimetic nanomachines capable of computer control through defined circuits and Boolean logic.