On this year’s Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, pioneers in nanotechnology, thoughtful reader Eric beats us to the punch:

You’ve likely noticed that the chemistry Nobel Prize has been awarded to three chemists for the contributions to the study of molecular machines. They made impressive progress in being able to carefully arrange molecules so as to make machines that work.

As I read some of the articles about their work, I notice statements about how it required exceptional insight, great skill, and much intentional work to devise ways to arrange molecules so that they will function usefully.

Yet we are expected to believe on faith that uninterested and unthinking natural processes accidentally produced cells filled with coordinated functioning molecular machinery.

Right. We’ve called irreducibly complex molecular machines “prima facie evidence for intelligent design,” posing a mystery addressed by the revolutionary thinking of Michael Behe. See our upcoming documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe & The Mystery of Molecular Machines. For doing things nature is supposed to have done by a series of fortunate accidents, meanwhile, these synthetic chemists — Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa — received the highest honor that science has to offer.

From the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which recognizes the trio for their “design and synthesis of molecular machines”:

The first step towards a molecular machine was taken by Jean-Pierre Sauvage in 1983, when he succeeded in linking two ring-shaped molecules together to form a chain, called a catenane. Normally, molecules are joined by strong covalent bonds in which the atoms share electrons, but in the chain they were instead linked by a freer mechanical bond. For a machine to be able to perform a task it must consist of parts that can move relative to each other. The two interlocked rings fulfilled exactly this requirement.

The second step was taken by Fraser Stoddart in 1991, when he developed a rotaxane. He threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along the axle. Among his developments based on rotaxanes are a molecular lift, a molecular muscle and a molecule-based computer chip.

Bernard Feringa was the first person to develop a molecular motor; in 1999 he got a molecular rotor blade to spin continually in the same direction. Using molecular motors, he has rotated a glass cylinder that is 10,000 times bigger than the motor and also designed a nanocar.

The New York Times talked with famed synthetic chemist James Tour, who has advanced this work with his own nanocar design (“3 Makers of World’s Smallest Machines Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry“). Tour is a signer of our “Dissent from Darwinism” list, but of course they don’t mention that:

James M. Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, said the Nobel would bestow legitimacy on the field and help convince people that nanomachines are not just fantastical science fiction of the far future.

“No one is making money on these right now, but it will come,” he said. “These men have established and built up the field in a remarkable way.”

Dr. Tour predicted that the first profitable use of the technology might be machines that open up cell membranes in the body to deliver drugs. “It’s really going to be quite extraordinary,” he said.

That is exciting. Tour has also observed that his experience of this new technology underlines the enigma of life’s origin. On chemical evolution, he has written in an admirably slashing style:

Life requires carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. What is the chemistry behind their origin? Biologists seem to think that there are well-understood prebiotic molecular mechanisms for their synthesis. They have been grossly misinformed. And no wonder: few biologists have ever synthesized a complex molecule ab initio. If they need a molecule, they purchase molecular synthesis kits, which are, of course, designed by synthetic chemists, and which feature simplistic protocols.

Polysaccharides? Their origin?

The synthetic chemists do not have a pathway.

The biologists do not have a clue.

He calls for exposing students to this fact:

Those who think scientists understand the issues of prebiotic chemistry are wholly misinformed. Nobody understands them. Maybe one day we will. But that day is far from today. It would be far more helpful (and hopeful) to expose students to the massive gaps in our understanding. They may find a firmer — and possibly a radically different — scientific theory.

The basis upon which we as scientists are relying is so shaky that we must openly state the situation for what it is: it is a mystery.

The origin of life is a “mystery,” yet among faithful materialists, stating that plainly is akin to a thought crime, a concession to the deplorable “creationists.” Not an advocate of intelligent design, Tour nevertheless acknowledges that what nature accomplished by synthesizing life puts what he does in the laboratory in the shade:

Designing nanoncars is child’s play in comparison to the complexity involved in the synthesis of proteins, enzymes, DNA, RNA, and polysaccharides, let alone their assembly into complex functional macroscopic systems.

Meaning no disrespect, what these three newly minted Nobel winners did is also child’s play compared to whatever succeeded in minting the first life. The implications of that are profound, but naturally ignored by the popular science media.

Photo: Fraser Stoddard via Northwestern University.

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