"UCLA's James R. Heath: From Buckyballs to Moletronics"

(Excerpt from Science Watch, January/February 2001, Vol. 12, No. 1)

As a scientific pursuit, the search for a viable successor to silicon computer technology has garnered considerable publicity in the last decade. The latest idea, and one of the most intriguing, is known as molecular computers, or moletronics, in which single molecules serve as switches, "quantum wires" a few atoms thick serve as wiring, and the hardware is synthesized chemically from the bottom up. In the summer of 1999, University of California, Los Angeles chemists James R. Heath and J. Fraser Stoddart and their collaborators published an architecture demonstration of such a computer in Science (see C.P. Collier, et al., "Electronically configurable molecular-based logic gates," 285[5426]: 391-3, 1999). While the paper itself has yet to garner more than a comparative handful of citations, the press certainly took notice: "Tiniest circuits hold prospect of explosive computer speeds," read the front-page headline in the New York Times–prompting Heath to say, "I thought we did something significant, but I didn’t think it was that significant."
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