Figure 16: Buckyball

In the 1960s, Gyorgy Kepes, then Director of the Centre for Visual Studies at MIT, took uniformly sized black and white photographs of non-representational paintings by many artists. He mixed them all together with the same size black and white photographs taken by scientists of all kinds of phenomena through microscopes and telescopes. Then, together with his students, he classified the mixed up photographs by pattern types. What they found is not only that it was difficult to distinguish which was art and which was science, but when they looked at the backs of many art pieces, frequently they predated the scientific counterpart (Fuller, "Utopia or Oblivion," 113).

Buckminster Fuller related this story in one of his lectures and had a similar experience in 1962 when chemist Sir Aaron Klug observed geodesic structuring of viruses and wrote to Fuller telling him of his discovery. Fuller wrote back immediately with the formula for the number of nodes on a shell (10f + 2, varying according to frequency) as confirmation of Klug's hypothesis, and Klug answered that the values were consistent with the virus research (Edmonson 239). It is important to note that geodesic domes were utilised worldwide fifteen years before electron microscopy enabled detection of virus capsids. In 1982, Klug won a Nobel Prize for his "structural elucidation of important nucleic acid-protein complexes," and has been described as a "biological map maker," a Magellan "charting the infinitely complex structures of body's largest molecules" ("A Map Maker of Molecules").

A much more dramatic proof of Fuller's inventions was demonstrated only a year after his death when a carbon molecule remarkably resembling his structures was discovered by a group of scientists working at Rice University in Houston, Texas. During an experiment involving the use of laser beams to evaporate graphite, scientists Harry Kroto, Rick Smalley, Bob Cur and their students, identified a set of conditions in which the C60 species could be produced in an incredible numbers relative to any other cluster. The extraordinary stability of the molecule prompted the researchers to look its structure. When the researchers recalled the structure of the US Pavilion at the Montreal Expo '67, it helped them realize that the molecule consists of twelve regular, same-size pentagons and twenty regular, same-size hexagons (Kroto 162-163). This molecule is the third modification of carbon to be discovered, the other two being graphite and diamond.

What makes this discovery unique is that it occurred from the merging of two separate lines of research. Kroto was investigating the composition of mysterious long chain carbon molecules that have been detected in stardust, and was particularly interested in how such molecules might form in the outer flares of stars. He learned that Smalley had built a laser-powered device that would vaporise almost any substance and travelled to Rice to use it. The graphite experiment combined their experiences and interests and brought cluster physics and astrophysics together in a chemical exercise. The group discovered that when they vaporised carbon in a chamber filled with inert helium gas, an extremely strange thing happened: the carbon molecules formed into clusters, most of which contained 60 atoms, and they were so stable that the scientists could only theorize that the molecules must have arranged themselves into hollow, closed shells. When the scientists reported their discovery of the globular framework, the findings met with considerable scepticism. At the time, most chemists would have said that such a structure could not exist as a stable molecule. It was assumed that any such configuration would have to be flat (Supple A3). But by 1990, other labs had begun making the clusters in bulk, and the ball shape was confirmed. In addition, numerous forms were found, composed of interlocking hexagons and pentagons. The number of variations may be infinite. The hollow shape of the molecules provides a convenient container for one or more atoms of other elements, thus allowing for many new substances to emerge.

In honour of Fuller, these molecular clusters were named "buckminsterfullerenes" by Kroto and Smalley, and were later nicknamed "buckyballs." Their discovery spurred a revolution in carbon chemistry and a profusion of new materials: polymers, catalysts, and drug-delivery systems. The discovery has also been important to research in physics and has resulted in novel insights into superconducting substances and may also help explain the origin of the cosmos (Zimmer 30). In 1996, Robert F. Curl, Jr., Richard F. Smalley from Rice University in Houston, and Harold W. Kroto from the University of Sussex in England, shared a Nobel Prize for their collaborative discovery (Supple A3).

Although the discoverers were honoured with a Nobel Prize, there are a few who have pointed to this possibility earlier, but received no response. In the same way that Fuller's message of stable structures that utilize the tensegrity principles was too early for its time, the discovery of the molecule had to wait. As early as 1966, David Jones of the UK considered the possibility of graphite sheets curling up into hollow ball-like molecules. In 1970, Eiji Osawa of Japan suggested the existence of C60 with a truncated icosahedral shape based purely on symmetry considerations. In 1973, D.A. Bochvar and Elena G. Galpern of Moscow carried out some theoretical calculations that led them to postulate the great relative stability of a 60 molecule with a truncated icosahedral shape (Hargittai 336).
Whereas cells were regarded as the basic building blocks of living organisms during the nineteenth century, the attention shifted from cells to molecules toward the middle of the twentieth century when geneticists began to explore the molecular structure of the gene. Biologists were discovering that the characteristics of all living organisms-from bacteria to humans-were encoded in their chromosomes in the same chemical substance and using the same code script. After two decades of research, biologists have unravelled the precise details of this code. But while they may know the precise structure of a few genes, they know very little of the ways these genes communicate and cooperate in the development of an organism. Similarly, computer scientists may be well versed in networked technologies but have no clue as to how and why the Internet exploded as it did-organically and spontaneously.