Photo: SMILEY N. POOL, Staff

1n 2003, a nanotube image is reflected on Rice University professor Richard Smalley, a trailblazing researcher in an ultra-small frontier.

1n 2003, a nanotube image is reflected on Rice University professor Richard Smalley, a trailblazing researcher in an ultra-small frontier.

CONTACT FILED: RICHARD SMALLEY 1/15/03--Rice University professor Rick Smalley stands with a machine to make carbon nanotubes Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 15, 2003, in Houston. (Kevin Fujii/Chronicle)

CONTACT FILED: RICHARD SMALLEY 1/15/03--Rice University professor Rick Smalley stands with a machine to make carbon nanotubes Wednesday afternoon, Jan. 15, 2003, in Houston. (Kevin Fujii/Chronicle)

25 years later, buckyball a big find on small scale

This Houston Chronicle story ran on Oct. 11, 2010. The headline and words are reprinted below.

As is so often the case with great scientific discoveries, Rick Smalley, Bob Curl and Harry Kroto weren't looking for buckyballs when they found them in 1985.

Smalley had built a fancy machine at Rice University that used lasers to vaporize bits of metal. Kroto, meanwhile, wanted to better understand the nature of tiny chains of carbon dust between stars, so he asked his friend Curl if he wouldn't mind sticking a chunk of graphite inside Smalley's machine.

They did, and unexpectedly discovered a unique form of carbon in which 60 atoms clustered neatly into a tiny, soccer-shaped ball. They christened their finding a buckyball - or fullerene - after Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic designs the molecules resemble.

The discovery a quarter century ago won the trio a Nobel Prize in 1996 and is, in no small part, responsible for launching the field of nanotechnology.

Prior to the discovery, scientists - most famously Richard Feynman - had mused about manipulating and controlling atoms to perform special tasks.

But it remained mostly talk until the creation of a buckyball, essentially a tiny protective cage in which scientists could put other atoms, crystallized the possibility of creating particles with special properties.

"That got people thinking about how we could design molecules with tailor-made properties," said Gustavo Scuseria, a Rice chemist who came to the university four years after the discovery in large part because of the excitement it spurred.

"People were talking about nanoscience before, but there was no clear example of what could be a brick builder for nanotechnology. With the buckyball it was evident to everyone that this changed the game."

Latest developments

The buckyball itself hasn't delivered on some of the early hype, but its discovery led scientists to find more useful carbon materials, such as long, skinny carbon nanotubes and more recently, graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms.

The 2004 discovery of graphene by Russian scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, in fact, won the pair the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics last week.

"The principal effect of the fullerene discovery has been the development of intense worldwide interest in the chemistry of elemental carbon with several unusual and interesting new structures discovered," Curl said. "I am happy that our discovery has led to such a great deal of good science."

Carbon nanotubes and graphene are being studied for a raft of new technologies, from flexible TV displays to lightweight spacecraft materials to tiny and powerful semiconductors.

Beyond leading to new forms of carbon, the buckyball led scientists to tinker with the atom-by-atom design of materials for electronics and other purposes. The touch screens of many smart phones, for example, are possible because the use of nanomaterial to "paint" indium tin oxide on the front to create a transparent conductor.

Explosion of products

Nanotechnology also has worked its way into more conventional goods such as washing machines and air conditioners as engineers have embedded tiny bits of silver to take advantage of its antimicrobial properties.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies conservatively estimates that the number of nanotechnology-enabled products has risen from 54 in 2005 to more than 1,000 last year.

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1996, Smalley, who died of leukemia at the age of 62 in 2005, became an evangelist for nanotechnology. He urged President Bill Clinton to increase research funding, and with the help of Clinton's science adviser Neal Lane, the National Nanotechnology Initiative was begun in 2001.

Since then it has provided $14 billion in federal funding for nanotechnology research, with other federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense, providing as much or more.

"There was not a lot of push-back," Lane recalled of Capitol Hill. "It was pretty easy to explain to members of Congress if you can make things on a smaller and smaller scale and build them from the bottom up, you could make some things that might have a major impact on new kinds of medical treatments, new ways of computing and new materials that could revolutionize a lot of areas."

Boon for Houston

The buckyball's discovery was also a financial boon for Houston.

It has led to at least $500 million in federal research funding coming to Rice for its many nanotechnology research programs, said Wade Adams, director of Rice's Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

It's also spilled into other institutions in the Texas Medical Center and the University of Houston, where there are intensive programs to study the use of nanomaterials to treat disease, such as tiny gold shells that burn cancer cells and special drug-delivery devices that carry tumor-killing agents directly into cancers.

Nanotechnology's potential has only begun to be tapped, says Philip Lippel, an advisory board member for NanoBusiness Alliance.

While some technologies are near the market - engineers are counting on nanomaterials to continue the trend of ever-increasingly powerful computer processors and memory chips - others remain in various stages of development.

Medical applications take longer, he said, because they must first be developed in a laboratory and then pass through various phases of safety and effectiveness testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Just the beginning

Longer-term there's also hope nanomaterials may provide leaps to make technologies such as solar energy and water desalinization both efficient and cost-effective.

"I think we are just beginning to see what nanotechnology is capable of," Lippel said. "A lot of good 20th-century engineering solutions to energy, water, communications are going to have their economics changed by nanomaterials."

Lippel sees nanotechnology as a great enabling technology, similar to computing and information technology during the latter half of the 20th century.

But Peter Bishop, a University of Houston future studies professor, isn't ready to go that far, at least not yet.

"I don't put nanotechnology in the same category as some of the more disruptive technologies in our history like machines, coal, railroads, telephone or electricity," he said.

Instead he says nanotechnology will be more of an invisible, under-the-hood technology that provides incremental changes and allows people to do things better. He says nanotechnology may be more like the plastics of the 21st century.

"No one called the middle of the last century the plastics era, but it certainly was an important step forward in materials science," he said.

We'll just have to wait until the buckyball's golden anniversary to settle the question.

UPDATE

In recent years, Houston universities and Texas Medical Center institutions have continued to invest resources in nanotechnology, cementing Houston as a national research hub for all things on the nano scale.

In 2013, Rice university took the logical step creating the Department of Material Sciences and Nanoengineering, two fields that Rice researchers have dominated for years.

Two years later, the university was tapped by the National Science Foundation to establish the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Systems, Houston's first NSF Energy Research Center and the third in Texas.

That same year, the university announced it would invest $49 million in molecular nanotechnology.

The University of Houston launched its first nanotechology spinoff in 2013; Integricote, based in the university's Energy Research Park, produces protective coatings for wood and masonry, based on the work of physicist Seamus Curran.

Several other nanotech-based products for the energy industry are undergoing commercial testing, including an enhanced oil recovery fluid developed by physicist Zhifeng Ren, a pioneer in working with carbon nanotubes recruited from Boston College in 2013, and a "smart" cement, developed by engineer Cumaraswamy Vipulanandan, that can alert engineers to potential problems with a well before they become dangerous.

In 2010, Houston Methodist made a major investment in the future of nanotechnology by poaching nanomedicine pioneer Dr. Mauro Ferrari from the University of Texas Health Science Center to run the Houston Methodist Research Institute.

While there, Ferrari has continued to pursue his research including a nano-based technology that has been shown in mouse studies to destroy a lethal-type of breast cancer after it reached the lungs, a stage of the disease once considered untreatable.

Likewise, Ferrari has recruited a crop of highly-regarded scientists to the Institute where they continue to develop new ways to merge nanotechnology and medicine.

One such recruit, Dr. Alessandro Grattoni who now leads the Institute's Department of Nanomedicine, recently the launched the first of its kind Center of Space Nanomedicine.

Last year, Grattoni and his team had one of their experiments conducted aboard the International Space Station. That experiment involved testing a device that uses "nano channels" to deliver medication in a super precise manner. Another experiment is set to be launched in April.

- Kim McGuire

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25 years later, buckyball a big find on small scale - Chron.com