Life, from the bottom up

Richard Feynman, celebrated physicist, science communicator and bongo-drum enthusiast, gave a lecture in Caltech, USA, a few days after Christmas 1959, that would come to be seen by future nanotechnologists as essentially prophetic. His talk was entitled ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’, and was concerned primarily with discussing the feasibility of a future ability to store information and to control and manipulate machines on a length scale which was tens of thousands of times smaller than that of the macroscopic world of things like typical books and electric motors of that day. It was essentially a clarion call to scientists and engineers to develop a new field, which would later be termed nanotechnology (see Taniguchi, 1974). But in one aside, Feynman alluded to the very small scale of biological systems, and how cells used these to do ‘all kinds of marvelous things’, which in its own small way has been wisely prescient for the subsequent seismic shifts in our understanding of how biological systems really work. We now know that the fundamental minimal functional unit which can adequately describe the properties of these systems is the single biological molecule. That is not to say that the constituent atoms at smaller length scales do not matter, nor the sub-atomic particles that make up the individual atoms, nor smaller still the quarks that make up the sub-atomic particles. Rather that, in general, we do not need to refer to a length scale smaller than the single molecule to understand biological processes.