Buckyball's Birthplace -- Room 337 At Rice's Space Science Building -- To Get Permanent Honor

The success of the buckyball at Rice University 25 years ago has earned its place of discovery, room 337 in the university’s Space Science Building, renown as a national historic chemical landmark.

The buckyball, a 60-carbon structure in the shape of a soccer ball which was initially observed in outer space, was recreated at Rice in 1985 by Nobel Laureate and late physics professor Richard Smalley and colleagues, Professors Robert Curl (Rice University) and Harold Kroto (University of Sussex), who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. Buckyballs were named after the famous architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, who helped popularize the geodesic dome to which buckyballs bear a resemblance.

Rice will officially receive the designation on October 11, the 25th anniversary of the discovery, and plans to install two plaques in the Space Science Building: one in room 337, a lab-turned-classroom, and another outside the building.

Every year, the American Chemical Society bestows the National Historic
Chemical Landmark status to two chemical discoveries throughout the
world.

“This
award is extremely important to the chemistry community,” Wade Adams,
director of Rice’s Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and
Technology, tells Hair Balls. “The buckyball was revolutionary; it was contentious.
There were a lot of people that thought carbon could not exist in this
form. It was so elegant, simply, it had to be true, but it was such a
radical thing.”

The American Chemical Society requires that chemical
applicants for yearly landmark awards have been distinguished for at
least 25 years, have been continuously developing and have great
scientific significance, Adams said. The landmark designation is always
given to the place where the chemical was discovered or worked on.

The buckyball and the nanotube, an elongated
version of the buckyball, have potential uses in fields such as
medicine, aerospace, architecture, energy, computing and electronics,
Adams said.

“The buckyball really helped spearhead the
nanotechnology revolution as a field of study,” Adams said. “It is kind
of a building-block molecule; you can make them act like anything
because you can functionalize it so easily. So it had almost magical
powers in chemistry.”

The buckyball’s multiple applications stem
from its unique structure. Each carbon is bonded with exactly three
other carbon atoms, a structure not found in any other carbon molecules,
Adams said.

“It took a while to extrapolate more broadly that
at this scale, matter acts differently than it does at a human-sized
scale,” Kathleen Matthews, Rice’s advisor to the Dean of Natural Sciences, said.

After
observing a chemical in stellar dust in space, Kroto came to Houston to
work with Smalley to reproduce the substance. The scientists took
graphite and bombarded it with a high-energy ion beam until it formed
the 60-atom buckyball, Matthews said.

Nanotubes and buckyballs
are not only found in space. They can be found in carbon deposits in
smoke from fire burning, Adams said. Also, nanotubes are the strongest
material on earth, he said.

Other chemicals whose discovery
sites have received this status include penicillin, Kevlar, transparent
Scotch tape, nylon and the deciphering of the genetic code.