Nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle likens today's manufacturing methods to building a Lego castle wearing boxing gloves.

"Yes, you can push the Lego blocks into great heaps and pile them up," he writes, "but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like."

Molecules -- the miniscule Legos of life -- are the fundamental building blocks of matter, and most modern machines are built wearing theoretical boxing gloves. Molecules are chopped, molded, and assembled in tremendous, collective slabs, rather than pushed into place one by one.

The gloves are off
Nanotechnology, Merkle says, will allow engineers to build materials and machines molecule by molecule. "Nanomachines" will be invisible to the naked eye but many times more powerful than today's high tech components.

• Click here to watch videos of "nanogears" at work.

Merkle at work
Merkle is a principal fellow at Zyvex, the first nanotechnology company geared toward manufacturing real-world nanoproducts.

He also edits the scientific journal Nanotechnology and is an adviser to the Foresight Institute, under whose auspices he chaired the fourth and fifth Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology. The institute awarded Merkle the 1998 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for theory.

In addition to his groundbreaking work in nanotechnology, Merkle coinvented public key cryptography, earning him the Association for Computer Machinery Kanellakis Award, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Kobayashi Award, and the 2000 RSA Award in Mathematics.