But all of that changed last September, when scientists succeeded in making gram quantities of the material. Now, just about any bench scientist can join the original "buckyball" pioneers in exploring the properties of C60 in his or her own lab.
It was late on an August evening six years ago that Rice University professor Richard Smalley sat in his kitchen, cutting out shapes from a legal pad and taping them together. He was trying to come up with a model having 60 vertices to represent the 60-carbon molecule which he and his collaborators generated in the lab by laser-vaporizing carbon in helium gas. Chemist Harold Kroto was one of these collaborators. He had come to Rice from the University of Sussex in England to use the Houston school's laser technique, with which he hoped to be able to generate carbon chains he thought might be components of interstellar dust. ...
