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.
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.
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."
"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."
He seems like an interesting guy all-around.
No comments:
Post a Comment