What impact will nanotechnology have on society and culture?

Naming of molecule connected to culture...

"This discovery was one of the most spiritual experiences that any of us in the original team of five have ever experienced. The main message of my talk today is that this spiritual experience, this discovery of what Nature has in store for us with carbon, is still ongoing. So the title of my talk is not "The Discovery of the Fullerenes" but rather "Discovering the Fullerenes". Fullerene researchers worldwide are still engaged in this process of discovery. "

--- Richard E. Smalley. Discovering the Fullerenes. Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1996
Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, Rice Quantum Institute, and Departments of Chemistry and Physics, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA

US Pavilion at Expo '67, Montreal, Canada: "A giant dome, roughly three-quarters of a sphere, designed to look like a lacy filigree weightless against the sky. Height: 200 feet: spherical diameter; 250 feet. Construction: a space frame of steel pipes enclosing 1,900 molded acrylic panels."

—from Sylvia Hart Wright. Sourcebook of Contemporary North American Architecture: From Postwar to Postmodern. p33.

Fuller did not develop his original great-circle coordinate geometry in order to build domes; he built domes because otherwise people would not understand the geometry - which rejected the XYZ coordinate system of standard mensuration. He advanced synergetics as nothing less than a new way of measuring experience and as a new strategy of design science which started with wholes rather than parts. Fuller had a lifelong interest in the carbon atom, and, in many of his writings and lectures, he celebrated J.H. van't Hoff's 1874 concept of the tetrahedral configuration of carbon bonds.

H.W. Kroto said that the newly discovered carbon cage molecule was named buckminsterfullerene "because the geodesic ideas associated with the constructs of Buckminster Fuller had been instrumental in arriving at a plausible structure". Smalley's laboratory equipment could only tell them how many atoms there were in the molecule, not how they were arranged or bonded together. From Fuller's model they intuitcd that the atoms were arrayed in the shape of a truncated icosahedron - a geodesic dome.