Book Reviews

It was a bold vision, and stirred much debate within the scientific community. Now, with Unbounding the Future, Drexler and his co authors return to the topic to see how much closer we are to achieving nanotechnology, and what its implications are for the future. Though there are still many barriers to be overcome before science is able to create even the crudest molecular assem blers, for many the outlook has already changed from if to when. The reason for this shift is the strides contempo rary science has made toward constructing the first molecular assemblers. Additional research with the scanning-tunneling microscope has led to the ability to move single atoms with great precision, a fact most dramatically demonstrated in April of 1990 when two researchers from IBM spelled out the company's initials on the atomic scale using 35 Xenon atoms. With these and other developments, 443 it is a very real possibility that we could soon find ourselves in the midst of a second industrial revo lution (with effects as far reaching as the first) within the decade.

The exact timescale for such a revolution is hard to predict because there are multiple paths by which the first nanomachines might be built. Developments in such diverse fields as the com puter industry, genetic engineering, microminia turization, physics, and chemistry have all been leading toward work at the atomic scale. It is still unclear exactly how the first molecular assemblers willbe constructed, and a host of technological dif ficulties remain. But nothing about the project seems impossible, and the problems involved are probably no more daunting than the ones for send ing a man to the moon were in 1959. However, one huge advantage nanotechnology has over the moon race is that most of the diverse forces propelling its development are coming from the private sector, and several major companies and institutions are already taking nanotechnolo gy quite seriously.The Japanese Ministry of Inter national Trade and Industry (MITI) has started a Nanotechnology Center in Tokyo, and Stanford University is already offering a course in the sub ject. Besides IBM, other Fortune 500 companies like Du Pont and AT&T are already investigating molecular assembly precursor technologies, and Autodesk, one of the nation's leading software firms, is already working on programs to do com puter-aided design at the molecular level.

Much of Unbounding the Future examines the various possibilities molecular assembly presents by means of quasi-fictionalized "scenarios," all of which examine the question, "what will the nan otechnology revolution mean for the life of an average person livingin the 21st century?" If even a fraction of what Drexler and company envision comes true, the short answer is "amazing things." For starters, industry gets a production tool faster, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient, and less labor intensive than anything now in existence. In one scenario, the authors envision a "mom and pop" nanotech factory where a wide variety of items can be produced on short notice from vats of prefabricated micro-materials using pro grammable assemblers. The authors see nanotech nology replacing not only conventional factories, but also the fossil fuels they run on, noting that "nanotechnology can make solar cells efficient, as 444 THE FREEMAN • NOVEMBER 1992 cheap as newspaper, and as tough as asphalt tough enough to use for resurfacing roads."

Nanotechnology is also seen as the primary means to carry the evolution of computing power to its logical conclusion. With existing electronic methods rapidly approaching the limits of minia turization, Autodesk founder John Walker notes that nanotechnology "can build devices one thou sand times faster, more efficient, and cheaper than those we are currently using." With cheap nanocomputers, it would be easy and inexpensive to make many commonplace materials and objects "smart." One of the scenar ios the authors outline is that of "smart paint." An average homeowner would be able to mark off a patch of wall with a special chemical pencil, then shovel intelligent nanomachines inside the lines. The nanomachines would then scurry along, cov ering the area until they encountered the marked boundaries, at which point they would communi cate with each other to lie down and bond to the surface.

One of the authors' biggest concerns is the envi ronment, and there are comments on the ability of nanotechnology to clean up environmental dam age throughout the book. While these concerns lead them to make some unwarranted assump tions (such as taking the much-hyped and as yet unproven "greenhouse effect" at face value), they are correct at pointing out that nanotechnology could clean up the environment without sacrificing economic growth. They call this concept "green wealth," and it provides a marked and welcome contrast to the strong neo-Luddite strain of the mainstream environmental movement. Also, unlike many of their green fellow travelers, Drexler and company understand the power and necessity of the free market. Of all the possible applications Drexler and company discuss, perhaps none fuels the imagina tion quite as much as the role nanotechnology could play in medicine. Noting that the body already uses such "natural molecular machines" as digestive enzymes and hemoglobin, the authors foresee nanomachines augmenting the body's nat ural immunosystem, destroying harmful viruses and bacteria even more efficiently than the body's own white blood cells. Other nanomachines could repair cellular damage, clean out blocked arteries, and even regrow new organs and limbs. At the far end of the technology's limits, even a slowing or complete halt of the natural aging process seems possible. Even acne, that eternal teenage scourge, could be eliminated through a nanomachine "cream" that cleaned out individual pores.

Some of what Drexler and company envisage seems pretty far-fetched. It seems highly unlikely that custom, nanomachine-built underground rail wayswillever become common, much less replace the automobile. And other possibilities lie so far in the future that their mention here treads the bor der between speculation and fiction. And as with almost any work championing a previously unknown concept, Unbounding the Future is far better at outlining the vast possibilities of nan otechnology than at examining some of its equally daunting problems. While there are two chapters devoted to addressing these issues, both fall some what short. In the first, "Limits and Downsides," the authors make a good case for the long-term bene fits of nanotechnology for almost everyone in the world. However, in doing so they gloss over many of the mid-term dislocations it will create. For example, what happens to developing nations when the West not only leaps ahead in industrial productivity, but no longer needs either the raw materials or the labor the Third World previously provided?

In "Safety, Accidents, and Abuse," the authors ably demolish most of the doomsday scenarios associated with nanotechnology, but are less suc cessful with addressing the possibilities of abuse. For example, the issue of privacy is only briefly touched on (imagine the surveillance potential of nano-bugs and cameras in the hands of a KGB). Although they do note that strict controls on research would only succeed in driving nanotech nology underground or to less regulated nations, they still place entirely too much confidence in the ability of international regulators to slow the spread of nanotechnological weapons. If Saddam Hussein's sprawling nuclear weapons program could go largely undetected by the world commu nity, the idea of preventing the spread of weapons that can be built in something far smaller than a high school science lab seems hopelessly naive. Still,all these are minor flawsin a book that tries to map territories others have not even begun to explore. As the authors point out, nanotechnology offers us the possibility to trade old problems for new. If even a fraction of what Drexler and company envisage comes to pass, the nanotechnology revolution will change the lives of our children as radically as the computer revolution has changed our own, and as the industrial revolution changed our ancestors' almost 200 years ago. D Mr. Person is former editor of Citizens' Agenda.

His work has appeared in National Review, Reason, and other magazines. IMPOSTORSIN THE TEMPLE by Martin Anderson Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York,NY 10019•256 pages •$22.00. Reviewedby DavidM. Brown A few decades ago, when Martin Anderson was but a grad student, he engaged (just once) in the kind of academic game he has now written a book to decry. Anderson submitted a paper on trade relations for a course on international economics. It was a straightforward, descriptive treatment-no "theo ry," no mathematics. The paper earned a B rather than an A, because, as his professor scribbled next to the grade, it was "empirical." His paper sadly "didn't have it." What was "it"? Anderson took a wildguess,and his next paper, also slim on theory, rippled with intimidating mathematical equations. "I handed that paper in with a certain foreboding. The theory was so simple, so trivial, that, if clearly understood, it could be laughed at. But, on the other hand, 1 was confident that [Professor] Kindleberger would not understand the mathematical equations 1had used in the exposition of my 'original theory.' A few days later I got my grade: an A, with the written comment, 'I like it' .... That was the last mathematical, 'original theory' article 1 ever wrote."

But others play the same game-Anderson calls it "the glass bead game"-without allowing any passing twinges of self-reproach to stop them. These are the professors who fill the academic journals with calculus-crammed elucidations of the trivial or incomprehensible for the sake of stuffing resumes, impressing indexers, and secur ing a firmer grip on the next rung of the ladder of academic success. These are the professors who shirk teaching, ruthlessly exploit their grad stuBOOKS 445 dents, and squelch academic freedom in the name of political correctitude. Yes, there are still many individuals of integrity in our universities, men and women who produce worthy scholarship and are effective and dedicated teachers; but by Ander son's reckoning they are an endangered breed. The institutional pressures for conformity are overwhelming. Most of Anderson's major contentions about the rot in higher education have already been aired in works like The Closingof the American Mind, Profscam,and IlliberalEducation;there has been some debate about what these books have to say, but not yet enough to actually change things.

Like all lumbering, entrenched bureaucracies, our colleges and universities are slow to reform. Hence, the more polemical kicks in the pants crit ical observers can give them, the better. And Impostorsin the Templedoes have quite a number of useful insights and observations to offer. Anderson begins his investigation by distin guishing between two major types of intellectuals in our culture: the "academic" and the "profes sional" (or what George H. Smith would call the "market intellectual"). While there is some over lapping between the two groups, they are generally somewhat standoffish toward one another. The academic intellectual is tenured, insulated, simul taneously protected from the disciplineof the mar ketplace and at the mercy of his institutional cul ture. If he plays by the rules, he need not worry about satisfying the customers. The "professional intellectual," on the other hand, though he may be as arrogant as any denizen of the lumpenprofes soriat,must offer someostensible value to his audi ence; he cannot afford merely to rack up glass beads in some unread journal, or mumble a dis jointed lecture and go home. And however wrong headed the professional intellectual may be, he tends at a minimum to be intelligible.

But how did the academic intellectual get to be so, well, academic(in the pejorative sense of the term)? A major impetus to the decline in standards has been the mushrooming of university enroll ment since the 1960s. This engendered a corre sponding increase in the demand for professors to teach all the new students. Only a certain small percentage of the general population, however, has both the intellectual capacity for scholarly studies and the patient temperament essential for teaching young and untutored minds. So, with the 446 THE FREEMAN • NOVEMBER 1992 sudden increase in demand for professors, stan dards were trimmed. Then they were trimmed a little bit more. Finally, anyone willing to comply with all the academic rigmarole was accepted into the club. The influence of public funding, much expanded over the years, should also be men tioned, for it made it increasingly feasible for the university culture to ignore once venerable obliga tions to students and to scholarship.

Anderson also explicitly points the finger at "intellectual pace-setters." In the end, though, he gives too little attention to the influence of philo sophical currents, which certainly have been flow ing for much longer than a few decades, and which ultimately do shape institutional trends. For this philosophical background, one has to go to books like Allan Bloom's The Closingof the American Mind or Leonard Peikoff's Ominous Parallels. Without that background the games academicians play are incomprehensible. Why, for example, is mathematics so widely insisted upon as crucial to argumentation in the social sciences? There's more involved here than a tacit conspiracy among academic hacks; there is also the legacy of the sci entistic urge to apply the methods of the physical sciences, which investigate regular phenomena, to the study of the much less predictable activities of persons. Perhaps, though, expediency and philo sophical error are comrades-in-arms, each abet ting the other. Inscrutable jargon helps protect the perpetrators not only from the public, but from one another; nobody wants to be the first to admit a failure to understand.

Anderson has written a good book, if not a ground-breaking one. His personal experience is invaluable in fleshing out our picture of the mod ern-day university, showing us just how pervasive and ingrained the corruption has become-to the point where even the most outrageous deeds are met with indifference or hasty rank-closing. To combat this situation, he offers a constructive laundry list of reforms: "change the Ph.D. pro cess," "stop athletic corruption," "end faculty tenure" ("the corrupting influence of a guaranteed job for life far outweighs any arguments in support of the idea"). The problem is not coming up with the right reforms, however, but getting them implemented. How can tenure be ended, for example? Ander son is willingto let those who already have it, keep it, in a kind of grandfather clause. But then we would have a two-tiered academy, with untenured newcomers constituting a sort of second class, and perhaps a rather bitter one. Yet Anderson seems right to argue that it is hardly workable to strip tenure from those who have had it and counted on it for many years, at least not in the present con text. This implies the need for a larger reform: get ting government out of higher education and forc ing our universities to be more competitive.

Whatever the best answers are, there's a long haul ahead. By asking many of the right questions, Impostorsin the Templehelps us draw a road map to a saner future. 0 David M. Brown is a free-lancewriter. ECOCIDEIN THE USSR by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr. BasicBooks,Harper Collins,10East 53rdStreet,NewYork, NY 10022-1992 - 376 pages - $24.00 Reviewedby MatthewHoffman T hat Communism in Russia failed is an undisputed fact, but for the most part knowledge of its demise has come to us in vague and fragmentary images. We are familiar with the notion that the system collapsed under the weight of its "internal contradictions" (i.e., the impossibility of profit and loss calculation, first pointed out by Ludwig von Mises), and we know that central economic planning impoverished the Soviet people. But the reality that lies behind the political upheavals in the Eastern Bloc has been hidden for years behind false government statistics and propaganda. In recent years, however, the media have gained access to more reliable infor mation. The ruins of the Soviet empire have been opened to reporters, and more accurate statistics are being kept. In Ecocidein the USSR, two jour nalists bring the new statistical data to life with on the-scene reporting.

Despite its title, Ecocideis much more than an environmental horror tale; it is a panoramic look at man-made human misery. The authors are not concerned so much with "the environment" as an end in itself, but with the human environment. Hence, they focus on the tragic health conditions in the former Soviet Union. A piecemeal statistical profile is slowly taking form. Seventy-five percent of the former Soviet Union's surface water is polluted, and 25 percent is completely untreated. Over pne-third of the for mer subjects of the Soviet empire live in cities with air containing five or more times the legal limit of pollutants. Eighty percent of rural hospitals have no running water, and half have no sewer connec tions. Three-quarters are overcrowded. The health consequences are staggering. Aver age life expectancy, always low, has actually dropped since the mid-sixties-from 66.1 years to 63.8 years in 1989. Infant mortality runs at 33 deaths per 1000, comparable to that of Malaysia.

In 1990, only half of those eligible for the draft were healthy enough to serve. Much of the problem lies in the corruption that pervaded the Soviets' politicized society.The Sovi ets boasted of an abundance of licensed physicians, but many of them bribed their way through medi cal school. As a result, 40 percent of medical school graduates cannot read an electrocardio gram, and half of working pediatricians are "com pletely ign<?rantabout the properties of 16 widely used drugs." In one region of Turkmenistan, 70 percent of obstetrician-gynecologists lack surgical skills, and half of their patients died in operations as a direct result. The authors tell of one woman who paid 300 rubles in bribe money to receive a modicum of care at a maternity hospital when she gave birth in 1987.She received no additional attention, and no gynecological examination afterward. Other mothers learned to circumvent the system of "free" medicine through the black market, bribing medical personnel for syringes, sterilizing equip ment, and medicines they could administer them selves.

Ecocide also examines the problems facing Soviet agriculture and heavy industry, painting a .bleak picture of the laborer's existence in what once wastouted as a "worker's paradise." Pesticide use on the Soviets' collective farms was so mis managed that many workers succumbed to pesti cide poisoning while in the fields. Industrial work ers fared much worse; in some steel-smelting plants the fumes from the primitive open-hearth furnaces were so thick that employees couldn't see BOOKS 447 one another and had to grope around. Ironically, Soviet Communism actually created the very con ditions its advocates had imputed to 19th-century capitalism. While life spans and health conditions advanced rapidly in market economies, Soviet liv ing standards stagnated and workers toiled in what the authors, echoing William Blake, call "dark, satanic mills." Dickens and Sinclair together could not have painted a bleaker picture.

Rampant alcoholism, a major detriment to human health in the USSR, grew out of the spiri tual malaise of Soviet life. Soviets turned to the bottle as their principal form of escape in many communities. In one village an average adult con sumed 60 bottles of vodka a year. Some estimate that 30 million Soviets were chronic drunks in 1989, and on-the-job intoxication was a major social problem. Ecocideis valuable not only as an indictment of Communism, but of environmentalism, which blames economic growth for human health prob lems and prescribes central planning as a cure for environmental ills.The authors note that the Sovi ets needed something far beyond the healing arts: a healthy standard of living. In the midst of the accelerating economic failures of the 1990s, the basic indices of Soviet daily life-income, food, and housing-all pointed down, not up. Poor nutrition alone eroded overall public health and jeopardized the survivalchances of many newborn children.

The authors properly attribute the problems of the Soviet economy to Communism's inability to perform cost calculations. Although they refuse to dismiss the possibility of central planning, they note that "without a market mechanism to deter mine the value of credit, goods, and services, [the planners] assigned arbitrary costs and prices to capital, labor, raw material, and equipment." Ecocideis a valuable addition to the growing lit erature on Communism's demise. Freedom affords us not only economic prosperity and digni ty as individuals; it also brings a cleaner, healthier society. D Matthew Hoffman is an adjunct policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

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For information on the Cato Sponsor Program, write to Jonathan Emord, Director of Development; Cato Institute, 224 Second Street, SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. Fax: (202) 546-0728. RNSTlITUTE THEFREE IDEAS ON LIBERTY 452 The Coming of Christ John W Robbins A Christmas message on how Christianity has profoundly shaped Western civilization. 462 Markets in the Post-Cold War Era: ControBed or Free? Amy L. Sherman The end of Communism in Europe does not inevitably mean economic freedom. There is more than one form of socialism. 469 Are There No Limits to Federal Regulatory Power? Russell G. Ryan Congress has made a federal case out of killing ants. 471 The Food Police Are Watching You K. L. Billingsley How government protects us from little green apples. 473 Workers and Unions-How About Freedom of Contract? George C. Leef Let's give workers a real choice. 477 America's Child Protective System: Is It Really Protection?