Editor's Page
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November 7, 2005 - Volume 83, Number 45
- p. 3
Richard E. Smalley, 1943–2005
Rudy Baum, Editor-in-chief
The world lost a major intellect with the death on Oct. 28 of Richard E. Smalley from leukemia (see page 7). Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the fullerenes, but by then he had become more focused on the potential of cousins of the fullerenes-carbon nanotubes-and had become a champion of a national research initiative on nanotechnology. In recent years, in addition to his research on numerous nanotechnology fronts, Smalley had focused on the massive challenge the world faces with regard to energy.
Photo by Rudy Baum
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I knew Smalley for more than 20 years. Of the hundreds of scientists I have written about for C&EN over a 25-year career, Smalley was one of the ones whom I became closest to. As a reporter, you always have to be careful about becoming too close to people you are reporting on, but by the time Smalley won the Nobel Prize and I was no longer an active reporter, I considered him a friend.
I first became aware of Smalley's research in the early 1980s when I was responsible for writing a feature C&EN ran at that time called “Physical Chemistry Update.” It was not a project I enjoyed-it was an effort to capture in two pages the progress that had been made in a major subdiscipline of chemistry over the past year or so, and it was not a lot of fun to research and write. In the course of the telephone interviews, though, Donald Levy, a chemistry professor at the University of Chicago, told me that I should contact Smalley, who, he said, had developed a powerful laser vaporization technique hooked up to a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. Smalley was measuring properties of very simple clusters of metal atoms and had published, for example, on the chromium dimer.
I talked to Smalley, wrote up the piece, which included a section on his work, and pretty much forgot about it.
In late 1984, I received a phone call from Smalley, who said something to the effect, “I've got a result I think you will find interesting.” His results suggested that he and his coworkers had discovered a new form of carbon, the archetypal form being a 60-atom molecule with the geometry of a soccer ball. He sent me the Nature paper announcing the result as well as a Journal of the American Chemical Society paper that presented further results supporting the idea of a family of carbon-cage molecules that Smalley, Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and their coworkers dubbed fullerenes. C&EN carried a Science Concentrate timed to the Nature article and a cover story-the first of several-to coincide with the JACS paper.
The idea of the fullerenes was controversial at first, and I will admit today that I did not include as many of the critics' caveats in my early stories as I would almost certainly require a C&EN science reporter to include in his or her coverage of a controversial scientific result today. Smalley was an enormously persuasive advocate, and several lines of evidence suggested strongly that only the C60 soccer ball could explain all of them.
I wrote a lot about fullerenes over the next decade-too much, some critics complained. They may have been right. Every reporter falls in love with a story at some point in his or her career, and the fullerenes were that story for me. It helped that Smalley and Kroto were both rather colorful characters, at least for chemists, and that their collaboration soured almost immediately after the first couple of papers were published. I got to know the graduate students—James Heath and Sean C. O'Brien—who had done many of the early experiments.
At the center of it all, though, was Smalley. He was a small, slightly built man, with a fringe of white hair and a beard and an impish smile that masked a ferocious intellect. I had many long conversations over the years with him about science and later about energy and the environment. I won't begin to pretend that I always understood the science, but I always learned from him. He cared deeply about chemistry and science and humanity's future. He will be missed.
Thanks for reading.
- Chemical & Engineering News
- ISSN 0009-2347
- Copyright © 2006 American Chemical Society
