I received some rather pointed criticism for my guest  editorial a couple of years back Material by Design: Future Science or Science Fiction? If the following video is any indication my "radical conservatism" may not have been misplaced.
In my editorial IÂ suggested that the prospect of being able to design a material for a specific purpose is a rather long way off and that we are stuck with the 'hit or miss' iterative process that we use today for the foreseeable future.
This video shows that even the iterative process of trying to develop a material that can detect benzene can be a time consuming process and will take sudden and unexpected turns
Â
Dexter Johnson is a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum, with a focus on nanotechnology.