respect, I don't think that there is all that much scary about nanotechnology.
Like all words derived from the word "technology" nanotechnology can have uses for positive purposes and negative purposes and will generate fearful reactions based on suppositions and imagining (rather than realities) of disaster.
Many nanotechnology devices occur naturally. The process of oxidative phosphorylation which takes place in the membranes of mitochondria, involves a "molecular motor" in which the enzyme ATP synthase rotates, driven in part by good old fashioned electrical fields. The process is critical to the synthesis of ATP on which all eucaryotic life, including every human being reading this, depends. You can look it up. In fact, you can actually see this molecular motor operating on line since in 1997, the Japanese scientists Yoshida and Hisabori were actually able to film the "motor" rotating. Note that the motor is not synthetic, you have many trillions of such motors operating in your mitochondria. In the first link you are actually looking at a microscopic film of the actual enzyme working.
http://www.res.titech.ac.jp/~seibutu/hisabori/fig2.movhttp://www.res.titech.ac.jp/~seibutu/index.html.I grew up reading science fiction that predicted that if computers were made too powerful they would take over the world and enslave the human race. Of course, the incorporation of computers into every day life has not been a totally positive experience, but on the other hand, the worries and promise of "artificial intelligence" have not been quite what we worried about while watching "Hal" in the 1969 movie Kubrick, "2001".
Some of the areas of nanotechnology research involve some of the most fundamental unanswered questions in the human search for knowledge. Among these is the nature and origin of self-ordering systems, in particular, the nucleic acids, which are "molecular zippers" in some sense. I think that some of this work by Chemists like RM Ghadiri, and Julius Rebek, and polymath Stuart Kaufmann is some of the most important and exciting scientific work now underway in any laboratories anywhere in the world. On some level it addresses one of the most fundemental questions, "why do we exist, and how did we come into being?"
As for Prince Charles, he is in my mind one of the quintessential Luddites of the age, and represents the perfect example of why rather than reducing inheritance taxes to zero, we ought to raise them to 100%. This man is an unfortunate dilettante whose fame derives from the rather antiquated and silly notion that some people are born with intrinsic rights to resources for which they have done and contributed absolutely nothing.
Of course, it's not quite as bad as it used to be, of course. Charles useless cousin Nicholas II by virtue of his birth was accorded, deriving from no merit of his own, indeed in spite of his huge personal weaknesses, the absolute and total power that once resided in the Czardom of Russia. This unfortunate circumstance lead both indirectly and directly to some of the most abysmal and tragic events of the twentieth century, including arguably, the First World War, The Second World War, the Russian Civil War, the 1920-30 Russian famines, the dismemberment of whole Asian cultures and peoples, the enslavement and executions of millions upon millions of innocent people etc... (It is a measure of the depravity of the twenty first century, that Nicolas II is now being proposed as a candidate for religious sainthood.)
That this twit Charles doesn't bother to think before mouthing off on subjects about which he knows nothing demonstrates (and, yes, I know I am contradicting myself mildly here) that stupidity can be congenital.
(Edited repeatedly to correct poor wording, bad grammar, typos and ineffective use of language.)
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