However, it required some years before the scientific community in general accepted that flexibility and disorder are very relevant molecular properties also in other systems.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The laws of physics should allow us to arrange things molecule by molecule and even atom by atom, and at some point it was inevitable that we would develop a technology that would let us do this.
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.
Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.
Molecular collision dynamics has been a wonderful area of research for all practitioners. This is especially true for those who were following the footsteps of pioneers and leaders of the field twenty years ago.
The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.
Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.
The essential principles of the three-dimensional structure of organic molecules had been correctly formulated by the first Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Jacobus van't Hoff, as early as 1874.
We have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us.