“It is the first comprehensive review of this subject and presents a summary of discoveries made and methodologies developed by all people working in the field.”

Review articles usually have a high citation count, and the subject of this one is of multidisciplinary interest, so it is probably quoted not only by chemists but also by physicists, biologists, materials specialists, engineers, and other so-called "nanoscientists."

It is the first comprehensive review of this subject and presents a summary of discoveries made and methodologies developed by all people working in the field. Only a very small fraction of the work described is from my laboratory. The article contains no new previously unreported science; it is strictly a literature review.

The subject area, artificial molecular rotors, is important for almost anybody interested in building any type of molecular machinery, as rotating components are essential for most machines.

As I explained above, my own involvement represents only a small fraction of the article. It started at Christmas 1986 when a student, Piotr Kaszynski, now a professor at Vanderbilt University, brought some unexpected results to my office—he observed the formation of a new type of rigid molecular rods, highly unusual at the time, and it seemed to me that it should be possible to use them as a kind of "molecular Tinkertoys."

So, we started to build objects using them, and in one of our initial papers on the subject in 1992, we already speculated about using them for molecular rotors. We opted for surface-mounted rotors, and in 2004 reported a direct observation of the flipping of the rotating part of a single molecule attached to a surface.

Very long term; one can imagine applications in electronics, sensing, and other areas of practical interest for society.