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...