Robert Freitas

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Robert A. Freitas Jr. (born 1952) is a Senior Research Fellow, one of four researchers at the nonprofit foundation Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California.[1]

Career

Freitas holds a 1974 Bachelor's degree majoring in both physics and psychology from Harvey Mudd College, and a 1978 Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Santa Clara University. He has written more than 150 technical papers, book chapters, or popular articles on a diverse set of scientific, engineering, and legal topics. He co-edited the 1980 NASA feasibility analysis of self-replicating space factories and later authored the first detailed technical design study of a hypothetical medical nanorobot, the respirocyte, ever published in a refereed medical journal.

In 1977-78 Robert Freitas created the concept sentience quotient (SQ) as a way to describe the information processing rate in living organisms or computers. Freitas is authoring the multi-volume text Nanomedicine, the first book-length technical discussion of the potential medical applications of hypothetical molecular nanotechnology and medical nanorobotics. Volume I was published in October 1999 by Landes Bioscience while Freitas was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing . He published Volume IIA in October 2003 with Landes Bioscience while serving as a research scientist at Zyvex Corp., a nanotechnology company headquartered in Richardson, Texas, during 2000-2004.

Also in 2004, Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle coauthored and published Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, the first complete survey of the field of physical and hypothetical self-replicating machines. In 2006, Freitas and Merkle co-founded the Nanofactory Collaboration, a research program to develop the first working diamondoid nanofactory.

He received the 2007 Foresight Prize in Communication from the Foresight Institute.[2] In 2009, Freitas was awarded the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for Theory.[3]

In 2010, Freitas was granted a patent for what was at the time (2004) the first patent application ever filed on diamond mechanosynthesis.[4][5]

Bibliography

  • Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities (Landes Bioscience, 1999) ISBN 1-57059-645-X
  • Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Vol. IIA: Biocompatibility (Landes Bioscience, 2003) ISBN 1-57059-700-6
  • Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (Landes Bioscience, 2004) ISBN 1-57059-690-5
  • Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine: Biocompatibility (S Karger Pub, 2004) ISBN 3-8055-7722-2

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ IMM Presentations & Activities — see "2004": "Robert Freitas submitted the first patent ever filed on diamond mechanosynthesis"
  5. ↑ Simple tool for positional diamond mechanosynthesis, and its method of manufacture US Patent 7687146 -- Published 30 March 2010

External links

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