Kroto and charisma

A vision of a dome led to the naming of buckminsterfullerene. This carbon cluster has become an icon for chemistry, thanks to the media-friendly appeal it shares with co-discoverer Sir Harry Kroto.

Molecule of buckminsterfullerene in galactic guise. Credit: KEN EWARD/SPL

Sometimes it is difficult to know why particular scientific discoveries hit the public headlines. The hugely technical solution to Fermat's last theorem hardly seemed to possess the ingredients for a hit. It could not even resort to the kind of visual appeal that normally helps to bring a discovery before the public eye. By contrast, the popular impact of the ‘buckyball’, C₆₀, unabashedly relied upon visual charisma.

The story of the identification, modelling and naming of buckminsterfullerene in 1985 already has the quality of legend — like August Kekulé's vision of the benzene ring in a dream about a snake biting its tail. Sir Harry Kroto tells how his work at Rice University in Houston, Texas (with a team including Robert Curl and Richard Smalley), led to the identification of the 60-atom cluster of carbon which exhibited a stability at odds with any graphite-like or diamond-like configuration. An architecture was required that closed off the apparently dangling valencies in any of the immediately plausible arrangements.

The five-a-side team of buckyball discoverers: (from left) Sean O'Brien, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, Harry Kroto and James Heath. Credit: H. KROTO, UNIV. SUSSEX

It was difficult to see how a closed polygon of hexagons, like a ball of graphite, could work. The key moment came with the introduction of pentagonal faces (prefigured by Eiji Osawa in 1970), which can effect closure on extended orbs of hexagons of varied dimensions.

The suggestion welled up from Kroto's memory of the geodesic dome designed by the architect and visionary inventor, Buckminster Fuller, for the American pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. Kroto also recalled making a Fuller-style cardboard skymap for his children in the form of a “stardome”. The stardome comprised a truncated icosahedron of 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal faces, with 60 vertices.

On this hunch that pentagons were involved, Smalley worked into the night to construct the first paper model of the hypothetical structure.

A crucial component that Kroto brought to the buckyball team was his natural instinct as a designer. Indeed, he had long hankered after a career in graphic design, and, before the consuming success of C₆₀, planned to found a studio for scientific graphics. He is one of those scientists, like Leonardo and Kepler, naturally drawn to the tangible beauty of complex symmetries in works of nature and art.

Compared to the initial announcement of C₆₀ and the technical outline of “our somewhat speculative structure”, which occupied less than 1.5 columns of dryly laconic prose in Nature, the public broadcasting of the victory of the buckyball team was marked by a hatful of metaphorical goals. Extolling the “cosmic and microcosmic charisma of the soccerball”, Kroto's 1996 Nobel prize address expressed delight with its ascent to stardom: “This elegant molecule ⃛ has fascinated scientists, delighted lay people, and has infected children with a new enthusiasm for science. And in particular it has given chemistry a new lease of life.”

At present it looks as if the buckyball is to become the kind of modern icon for chemistry that DNA has become for molecular biology. It also helps, of course, if one or more of the discoverers exhibit a public charisma to match that of the molecule.