Abstract:
With America's worst industrial recession since World War II drawing to an end, it's increasingly clear that the future of manufacturing won't look much like its past. However painful the transformation, the U.S. factory sector is continuing a decades-old evolution away from labor-intensive activities measured more often by scale than precision. And in the wings awaits a new generation of molecular manufacturers -- which have more in common with chipmakers than carmakers -- aiming to create self-assembling machines on a nanoscale.