Rice Nobel Laureate and Father of Nanotechnology Dies

Now this is really a loss for the entire world. Richard Smalley was truly one of Houston's gems. He was my freshman chemistry professor at Rice and it's really sad to see him go.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3423476

Oct. 28, 2005, 3:25PM

Famed Houston scientist Richard Smalley dies
By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Richard Errett Smalley, a gifted chemist who shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of buckyballs, helped pioneer the field of nanotechnology and became Houston's most notable scientist, died this afternoon after a six-year struggle with cancer. He was 62.

Smalley possessed prodigious talent both within the lab, where he cobbled individual atoms together like tinker toys, and outside academia after he won science's greatest prize. In the decade since he became a Nobel laureate, Smalley pushed Rice University and Houston to the forefront of nanotechnology research.

"He was a person with extraordinary intelligence," said Neal Lane, President Clinton's science adviser. "But more than that, he was a real civic scientist, one who not only does great science, but uses that knowledge and fame to do good, to benefit society, and to try and educate the public. He had a palpable wish to solve some of the world's problems."

Born on June 6, 1943, in Akron, Ohio, Smalley's childhood was one of middle America and middle class. As a youth he spent hours with his mother, Esther Virginia Rhoads, collecting single-celled organisms from a local pond and viewing them under a microscope.

After earning his chemistry doctorate from Princeton University, Smalley accepted a job as an assistant chemistry professor at Rice in 1976.

At Rice, Smalley's research group set about building a series of beam-and-laser machines that could vaporize material, leaving individual atoms in the residue. By vaporizing different materials, and cooling the resulting atoms to very low temperatures, the researchers could study and manipulate how the atoms clumped together.

Jim Heath, now a professor at the California Institute of Technology, joined Smalley's lab in 1984 as a graduate student. Heath recalled his first day on the job, when Smalley patiently explained the experiments he wanted completed, and demonstrated how to operate the equipment.

There was just one problem: at 3 a.m., when he had finally finished the day's experiments, Heath realized Smalley had forgotten to tell him how to turn off the machine. With trepidation, Heath called the senior scientist at his home and woke him up.

"He was actually delighted that I was still there working that late," Heath said. "That was the sort of environment he created. He pushed people reasonably hard, but he balanced that by being a very compelling, almost Moses-like teacher. He knew what he wanted. You're unlikely to ever meet someone who had a more intense and focused mind than Rick."

A year after Heath began working in the lab, Smalley, along with Robert Curl at Rice and Sir Harold Kroto of University of Sussex, discovered a new form of carbon. This fullerene, or buckyball, contained 60 carbon atoms arranged in a perfect sphere.

Few scientists had expected to discover a new arrangement of carbon atoms because the element already was so well-studied.

"It was an absolutely electrifying discovery," said James Kinsey, then a chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became dean of natural sciences at Rice. "Within a year or two, you couldn't pick up a chemistry journal without one-third of the articles being about fullerenes."

The new carbon material proved to be surprisingly strong and lightweight, and had almost magical electrical properties. The buckyball's discovery helped fuel today's explosion of nanotechnology research, in which scientists are racing to exploit the unique properties of myriad nanomaterials, with applications for everything from medicine to bulletproof vests.

After the discovery Smalley continued to develop his lab and machines, finding new research funding and convincing Rice University to invest tens of millions of dollars in a new building and equipment for nanotechnology research.

"The whole operation was hugely professional," said Hugh Aldersey-Williams, author of The Most Beautiful Molecule: The Discovery of the Buckyball. "Smalley was at the top, the hands-on chief executive officer."

Rice's investment would pay off handsomely. After discovering the buckyball, Smalley's research group found a method to produce large quantities of carbon nanotubes, a cylindrical material also made of carbon which has eclipsed the buckyball in utility.

And then, in 1996, Smalley, Curl and Kroto won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. No other award comes close to bestowing as much honor and prestige on a scientist and university.

The chairman of Rice's board of governors at the time, William Barnett, recalled Smalley agonizing over whom to give the 10 tickets he had received for the awards banquet in Sweden. Barnett said Smalley gave two to his son, Chad, who later told his father he was bringing his mom, one of Smalley's ex-wives. Smalley had three.

"I think his reaction was, 'Oh lord, now I've got to ask the other one,'" Barnett said. "The Swedes were so taken with this, the joke going around the banquet was that they were going to tell Rick, if they had only known this in advance, they would have awarded him the peace prize as well."

After winning the Nobel Prize, Smalley turned his focus toward increasing the stature of Houston's research community and converting his research into tangible benefits.

He founded Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc. in 2000, the city's largest nanotech company, to produce large quantities of nanotubes for research and commercialization.

Smalley also worked with Lane to establish the National Nanotechnology Initiative, which provided the first federal funding for nanotech research in 2001. When Smalley testified before Congress in favor of the initiative, he was completely bald, having just undergone successful chemotherapy.

He had developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in early 1999. The cancer was treated and went away, but returned two years later as leukemia. Last year, when the National Cancer Institute announced it would spend $144 million to leverage the benefits of nanotechnology for the treatment of cancer, Smalley reflected upon his illness through the eyes of a scientist.

"In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural," Smalley said. "The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks."

In recent years Smalley also sought to employ nanotechnology to solve the world's energy problem, partly through improved generation, transmission and storage of electricity. It was a fervent, almost evangelical mission.

Smalley believed creating cheap, plentiful energy would, in turn, solve other problems such as hunger, lack of water and environmental damage. His passion for the topic inspired other great minds.

"He got me interested in this area," said Alan MacDiarmid, a 2000 Nobel laureate in chemistry, and a professor at both the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas at Dallas.

"Although Rick made enormous contributions to science, I believe his worldwide contributions in making so many of us aware of the huge energy problem is even greater and longer-lasting than the beautiful science that he discovered."

Smalley is survived by his wife, Deborah Lynn Smalley, and two sons, Chad and Preston. Services are pending.

eric.berger@chron.com