In the 2011 thriller novel Spiral, a scientist is forced to swallow a swarm of razor-clawed, fungus-tending micro-robots, a scene that hardly presents small machines in a positive light. So it may seem odd that the book's first-time author, 49-year-old physicist Paul McEuen, is a leader in the field of nanoscience, the study of structures smaller than a micron, or a millionth of a meter. One might think his fellow scientists would be disturbed that he mined his field for gory ways to kill people. "Actually," McEuen says, "they were very supportive. I even got a good review in the Journal of Mycology" Relaxed, thoughtful and highly literate - in a recent academic article he cited Hume, Joyce and Beckett along with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr - McEuen is a man of wide-ranging interests who has narrowed his scientific focus to the very, very small.
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