What are some of the things your students have made in MIT's Fab Lab? They have been consistently innovative in things I never would have thought of. One made a Web browser for parrots. One made a dress with sensors and spines to protect her personal space. One made an alarm clock you have to wrestle with to prove you're awake. You can buy at Wal-Mart anything you need; this is technology that you want. It's technology for a market of one person.

Is there any corporate interest in that kind of personalized fabrication? There is a quiet trend inching toward it. Instead of central, mass production, it's on-the-fly rapid prototyping, so things like clothes or shoes or a cell phone case get customized locally for a customer.

But most big companies look at the Fab Lab stuff and say, "It's nice those kids are playing with those cute toys, but we'll do the real stuff." They are repeating the mistakes of the transition from mainframes to PCs, where the mainframe people said PCs were toys. Conventional companies don't recognize the extent to which these aren't just toys but fundamentally threaten their business models.

Where will you go next? Molecular assemblies are 20 years out, and fab labs are one step toward them. Conventional labs use millions of dollars in equipment, but with just $20,000 to $30,000 in equipment, fab labs today let you work at the level of microns and microseconds. We are moving toward nanometers and nanoseconds. Ultimately, we will end up with Star Trek-style molecular assemblies that make anything from scratch.