Breathing new life into electronics

Over the years the subject of molecular electronics has been a focus of controversy. It has had strong advocates, notably the late Forest Carter of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, US, and also many critics who saw the ideas for molecular-scale electronic devices as speculations unsupported by experiment. Today molecular electronics is attracting worldwide interest; first, because of the current impact of molecular materials in applications such as displays, xerography and sensors, and secondly because the means of studying individual molecules are at last to hand.