Nano industry hits bottom

Your NanoBot has been working tongue-in-cheek to get the story behind this story.

Apparently, a nanotech conference in Chicago this week was briefly disrupted by a group calling itself T.H.O.N.G. (Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics). The calling card above was handed out at the event, although I am told that they showed up sans thongs. "Plenty of Room at this Bottom" is, of course, an homage to the famous Richard Feynman speech that inspired the nano revolution.

The background to this is that nanotech is being painted with the broad "biotech" brush, and lumped in there with genetic engineering. These protesters have demonstrated in the buff against genetic engineering before ("I'd rather be naked than eat biotch foods.") More proof that the anti-biotech movement, complete with its street theater branch, has now turned its attention to nanotechnology.

I'm still working to get to the ... um ... bottom of this story.

Update: A source close to the investigation (a bit too close for this source's comfort) has given me more details:

The time was cocktail hour. Then, there they were, surrounded by six or eight nanonudeguerrillas, men and women alike wearing nothing but their cold, battle-hardened stares on top and tiny shorts on the bottom. Then, as my eyewitness recounts the horror: "One of them turned to us and said something like, 'Hello NanoCommerce!' Then all of them dropped their pants and they had teeny teeny nanoscopic thongs. On their bodies they had painted phrases like 'plenty of room at THIS bottom'(with an arrow) and 'no nano'"

And like the well-disciplined, and apparently quite trim, gang that they are, they were gone in 30 seconds.

Why, for the love of G-d, Madonna and all things holy, why would they inflict this punishment on a group of nanotech businesspeople? My source can only guess:

"It seemed pretty obvious to me, however, that they were reacting to nano's use in genetics and proteomics. Kind of a case of attacking the tools rather than the use to which the tools can be put...but anyway..." Then, the voice trails off as the survivor is guided away by psychologists trained to deal with the human wreckage that remains in the aftermath of such disasters.