Watching the science establishment block almost all progress in "real" Drexler style nanotechnology for a quarter century after the publication of Engines of Creation.
Didn't it happen because Drexler style nanotech is hellish hard to create?
Really, I don't get how any kind of establishment can block that kind of research. It's somewhat cheap (at most at semiconductors level price, not at astronomy or high energy physics level), enough to lots of companies to afford and maybe individuals (there is only a ceiling estimative to costs, there is no floor). And it has a huge potential for short term revenue.
If there is nobody researching that, I'm willing to bet that it's because nobody knows where to start. Not because anybody is blocking them.
It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, how can it be both "hellish hard to create" and "somewhat cheap"? It's only the latter when compared to some of the most expensive science artifacts in history, "one of a kind" ones.
The way they could block direct progress on it was to make sure it got no government funding, which also influences industrial and private funding (see how NASA blocked private space efforts for decades because their people, or people in big companies that supplied them, were the only ones who could vet alternatives; that private space is finally getting somewhere is only due to the (early) retirement of the Space shuttle). So they claimed a lot of their projects were nanotechnology and since they by definition control the purse strings....
If you want some hard evidence, if you're familiar enough with Drexler's proposals, look at the first round or two of Nobelest Richard Smalley's "debate" with Drexler. Smalley was making strawman arguments, a very good sign he didn't want to debate what Drexler was actually proposing.
Anyway, it needs government or Bell Labs style "pie in the sky" funding right now because it is "hellish hard to create" and a lot of basic R&D remains to be done. Although as Drexler pointed out in Engines of Creation it's going to happen sooner or later, natural progress in various fields such a semiconductors and molecular biology will keep pushing the state of the art closer to what's needed to execute his vision.
When talking about nanotech it's important to distinguish between the politically conservative Engines of Creation nanotech and the engineeringly conservative Nanosystems nanotech. We seem more or less on track with the later.
Without touching on the supposed political conservatism of Engines of Creation (I always read him as a liberal who'd been mugged by reality, specifically the total lethality (if you were lucky) of getting it wrong), Drexler himself doesn't agree WRT to Nanosystems ... I couldn't quickly find the specific essay(s) where he clearly laid this out, but for a start look at this one: http://metamodern.com/2010/09/24/out-of-the-memory-hole-a-hi...
I should have been clearer, I meant conservative rather than Conservative. That is that he was concerned with the potential for political or cultural disruption and that we might need to be prepared for them, so the conservative assumption is that nanotech will progress very quickly.
