Smalley, Richard

Richard Errett Smalley was an American chemist and professor at Rice University who received the Nobel Prize in 1996 for his role in discovering the carbon-60 molecules, popularly referred to as buckyballs. Smalley was influential in promoting the National Nanotechnology Initiative that passed in U.S. Congress in 2003 to fund nanotechnology research and development. [Page 719]He was also at the center of a debate over the feasibility of molecular nanotechnology as described by K. Eric Drexler in Engines of Creation.

Richard Smalley, Ph.D. (1943–2005) won the 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes.

Smalley was born in 1943 in Akron, Ohio. He said that he was inspired to pursue a career in science by the former Soviet Union's launch of the first spacecraft to orbit earth, Sputnik 1, in 1957. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan in 1965 and then worked as a research scientist at Shell Chemical Company from 1965 to 1969. He attended graduate school at Princeton University, where he received an M.A. in 1971, and a Ph.D. in 1973. He became an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Rice University in 1976 and a professor of Physics in 1990. Additionally, Smalley held eight honorary doctorate degrees from universities in the United States, Belgium, and Israel.

In 1996, Smalley shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Sir Harold Kroto for discovering a new type of carbon that formed the shape of a soccer ball. They named the molecule buckminsterfullerene, which came to be called buckyballs. Smalley's research at Rice University, funded by the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences, focused on nanotube single-crystal growth. Smalley said that he was convinced that carbon nanotubes would provide new technologies for the future and he and his research group were working as quickly as they could to make that possibility a reality.

Smalley was influential in promoting U.S. federal funding of nanotechnology research and development through the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). When the House of Representatives' Committee on Science met in 1999 to consider whether the government should fund nanotechnology, Smalley testified that nansocale research would allow for advances in medicine, attract students to science fields, and strengthen both basic and applied scientific research.

Drawing on his research at Rice, Smalley cofounded Carbon Nanotechnologies, Inc. (CNI) in 2000 to produce single-wall carbon nanotubes, and quickly became the world's leading producer of the materials. CNI had developed more than 100 patents when the company merged with Unidym Inc., a subsidiary of nanotechnology company Arrowhead Research Corporation, in 2007 with the goal of developing carbon nanotube products for the electronics industry.

Smalley was well known for his disagreement with K. Eric Drexler over the feasibility of molecular nanotechnology, taking the position that molecular assembly is not scientifically possible. Smalley exemplified the fundamental difference between opponents and proponents of the vision of nanotechnology put forward by Drexler, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained scientist who had first popularized the notion of nanotechnology in 1986. Although Smalley said that he had originally been inspired by Drexler's work, particularly his book Engines of Creation in which he introduced the concept of molecular nanotechnology, he later concluded that molecular nanotechnology was not scientifically possible.

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