University of Sussex professor Harold Walter Kroto was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with Rice University professors Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Richard E. Smalley for their discovery of a new form of the element carbon, called Carbon 60. The third molecular form of carbon (the other two forms are diamonds and graphite), C60 consists of 60 atoms of carbon arranged in hexagons and pentagons and is called a "buckminsterfullerene," "fullerene," or by its nickname "Buckyball" in honor of Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles. Kroto made the discovery in 1985, and Curl and Smalley confirmed his findings.
Harold Kroto was born on October 7, 1939, in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England to Heinz and Edith Kroto. Raised in Bolton, Lancashire, England, he graduated with a degree in chemistry from the University of Sheffield in 1961 and received his Ph.D. there in 1964. In 1963 he married Margaret Henrietta Hunter, with whom he would have two children. His Ph.D. work involved high-resolution electronic spectra of free radicals produced by flash photolysis--chemical decomposition by the action of radiant energy. His postdoctoral work was conducted at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada. After completing this work he spent a year at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he also studied quantum chemistry. He began teaching and researching at the University of Sussex in 1967. He was appointed full professor in 1985 and a Royal Research Professor in 1991.
In the 1970s Kroto launched a research program at the University of Sussex to look for chains of carbon in interstellar space. Kroto worked with scientists at the National Research Council, where he did his postdoctoral studies, to find the space molecules and did actually find several chains in the years between 1975-78. He speculated that the molecules might be products of red-giant stars, but did not know how the chains themselves were formed. His search to find an explanation led him to not only the carbon-60 molecule, but also resulted in new areas of carbon chemistry study. In 1992 Kroto won the Italgas Prize for Chemistry for this work.
In 1984 Kroto borrowed from his wife's bank account and flew to Houston find out exactly how the carbon chains were formed. He had heard of the work being done in laser spectroscopy by Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice University in Texas and thought he could use their laser apparatus to simulate the temperatures in space needed to create the carbon chains. Smalley and Curl had been looking at semiconductors like silicon and germanium in the laser apparatus, and had no reason to look at simple carbon. But that September, the scientists turned the laser beam on a piece of graphite and found something they were not looking for, a molecule that had 60 carbon atoms. Carbon had previously been known to have only two molecular forms, diamond and graphite. They surmised correctly that this was a third form of carbon, and that it had a cage-like structure resembling a soccer ball, or a geodesic dome. They named the structure buckminsterfullerene, which became fullerene, and also by the nickname "buckyballs."
Two things made this find unusual. One reason is that fundamental research led to the discovery, and the second is that a corporation did not fund it. Evidence for the existence of large carbon clusters had existed before, but Smalley, Curl, and Kroto were the first scientists to fully identify and stabilize carbon-60. In October of 1996, all three were recognized for this remarkable discovery with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. At the time of the announcement Kroto thought he might be winner, but decided to go to lunch instead of waiting. He had been depressed because just two hours before the announcement he had been turned down for research funding by the British government for the very same research that had won him the Nobel Prize. That same year Kroto was knighted for winning the Nobel Prize.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which grants the Nobel, heralded the breakthrough. "From a theoretical viewpoint, the discovery of the fullerenes has influenced our conception of such widely separated scientific problems as the galactic carbon cycle and classical aromaticity, a keystone of theoretical chemistry," stated the Academy citation. Aromaticity refers to the chemical stability of organic compounds.
Kroto's research team in Sussex continues fundamental work on the fullerene, looking at its basic chemistry as well as the way it has changed how carbon-based materials are viewed. Interdisciplinary work is also being conducted on the interstellar applications of carbon microparticles. But Kroto is not one to speculate on the uses of carbon-60. In an interview in the newsletter Science Watch, Kroto explains that "fundamental scientists are not necessarily the best people to ask about applications. People like myself have, in a sense, spent a lifetime avoiding applications. We're puzzled about interesting things for their own sake, and we follow up on them." Kroto compares the discovery of the fullerene to the discovery of lasers; it was almost a decade before scientists discovered a practical use for lasers.
When Kroto began his research into carbon chains, his primary interest was finding carbon-60 in space. "It was discovered by simulating certain astrophysical conditions, after all," Kroto explained in the Science Watch interview. This desire was fulfilled when geochemist Jeffrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California found fullerenes inside rocks extracted from a 1.8 billion-year-old meteor crash in Canada. Bada thought that the molecules had been formed by their proximity to a red-giant star. Kroto himself had suggested almost 20 years ago that this might be the place to find carbon chains.
Recent Updates
July 14, 2004: Kroto was awarded the Royal Society's 2004 Copley Medal "in recognition of his seminal contributions to understanding the fundamental dynamics of carbon chain molecules, leading to the detection of these species (polyynes) in the interstellar medium by radioastronomy, and thence to the genesis of a new era in carbon science." Source: Royal Society, www.royalsoc.ak.uk, July 14, 2004.
August 23, 2004: Kroto will leave Sussex University in late 2004 to join the faculty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. Kroto says he is leaving Britain because raising funds for his work will become increasingly difficult after he reaches retirement age on October 7, 2004. Florida State has guaranteed funding for Kroto's research. Source:Daily Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk, August 23, 2004.
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