SoylentNews

The 2016 Chemistry Nobel has gone to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard (Ben) Feringa for their work on molecular-sized machinery. This field has been growing steadily over the last quarter of a century, fueled by advances in synthetic organic techniques, analytical instrumentation, and the imaginations of the people who are practicing it. Fundamentally, they've been trying to physically link our macroscopic world with the molecular-level one by bringing what we know about macroscale structures and engineering down to that size.

[...] it was during the 1980s that today's laureates demonstrated that synthetic chemistry could start to be treated from an engineering standpoint.

[...] Atom-by-atom nanotechnology may or may not be possible, but molecule by molecule? That's what keeps us walking around. If we can learn to build machines on that level, there is no telling what we might eventually be able to accomplish. I think that the reluctance to make that connection in some people is an unrealized leftover of vitalism, the feeling that the machinery of living cells is somehow "different". It isn't. It chunks and rattles and slides, and we can study it, understand it, and mimic it, and we can build things that evolution has never explored at all.

The three have made molecular knots, shuttles, rotors, chains, pumps, axles, switches, memory devices and even a nanocar — all at the scale of molecules