Science & Tech Quote by K. Eric Drexler

The casual sprawl of "and so forth" is doing more work than it admits. Drexler isn’t merely listing interests; he’s staging a posture: the technologist as omnivore, roaming across disciplines at a moment when boundaries were starting to feel negotiable. The line reads like a shrug, but the shrug is strategic. By presenting molecular biology and genetic engineering as adjacent stops on a wider tour, he normalizes the idea that innovations in one domain can be conceptually imported into another. That’s the intellectual move that made Drexler legible in the first place: a willingness to treat science as a toolkit rather than a set of guarded guilds.

The intent is self-positioning. He’s establishing credibility not through a single credential, but through breadth, implying a kind of anticipatory literacy: I was watching where things were headed. It’s a quiet claim of foresight, delivered in the modest grammar of recollection. The subtext says: the future won’t be built by specialists who stay in their lanes; it’ll be built by people who notice patterns across lanes.

Context matters because molecular biology and genetic engineering aren’t neutral examples. They carry the aura of life re-engineered, of control moving from description to design. By aligning himself with those fields, Drexler cues the reader to accept his larger project - the design mindset applied to matter itself - as a continuation of an already unfolding story, not a science-fiction leap. The phrase "and so forth" softens the ambition, but it also implies a horizon of disciplines that could be recruited next.