American scientist Richard E. Smalley is best known as one of the winners of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with fellow Rice University professor Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Briton Harold W. Kroto from the University of Sussex, for the discovery of a new carbon molecule, the buckminsterfullerene. It was given that name, or more simply "fullerene," in honor of architect Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome the carbon molecule resembles. A pioneer of supersonic beam laser spectroscopy, Smalley is also renowned for his elaborate supersonic beam experiments, which use lasers to produce and study clusters, aggregates of atoms that occur for a short time under specific conditions. The discovery of fullerenes promises to be the basis for not only a new area of carbon chemistry, but also a way to produce remarkably strong and lightweight materials, new drug delivery systems, computer semiconductors, solar cells, and superconductors.

Smalley...