Robert F. Curl Jr., who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry as one of the discoverers of remarkably simple yet completely unexpected carbon molecules known as buckyballs, died July 3 at a retirement home in Houston. He was 88.
His death was announced by Rice University, where Dr. Curl emeritus professor of chemistry.
Buckyballs, with their round, hollow structure, turned chemists’ ideas on what was possible for the shapes of molecules. A flood of scientists began studying them, spurring the nascent field of nanotechnology and dreams of building machines the size of molecules.
Before buckyballs, pure carbon was known to exist in only a few configurations: stacked in sheets like graphite; shrouded in hard, clear diamond crystals; and randomly scrambled into amorphous carbon.
But in 1985, Dr. Curl, along with Richard E. Smalley, a Rice colleague, and Harold W. Kroto, a scientist from the University of Sussex in England, developed a new configuration: 60 carbon atoms bonded into a molecule that resembled an old-fashioned soccer ball. They also found a larger version made of 70 carbon atoms.
The find was accidental, as they were looking for something else.
“You could argue it wasn’t one of our areas of interest,” said James R. Heath, a graduate student of Dr. Smalley who conducted many of the buckyball experiments, in an interview.
The chemists named the molecules buckminsterfullerenes after the architect Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. The name was later shortened to fullerenes or buckyballs.
Before the experiment, Dr. Kroto interested in molecules with long carbon chains observed in interstellar space. He hypothesized that the long-chain molecules were created in the atmospheres of carbon-rich red giant stars.
“Harry had studied these both in the lab and using radio telescopes,” said Dr. Heath, now president of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, “but they were very, very transient. And so you couldn’t get a picture of how they were made or how abundant they could be.”
At a scientific conference in 1984, Dr. Kroto Dr. Curl against an old friend. dr. Curl told him about a device from Dr. Smalley who used a laser to create an intensely hot vapor that coalesced into clusters. dr. Kroto realized that this device could create conditions similar to those in the atmosphere of a red giant.
dr. Smalley was less enthusiastic; evaporating carbon would be a distraction, causing the machine to lose time that would otherwise be used for the semiconductor research he and Dr. Curl pursued. dr. Smalley was even less enthusiastic after a research group at Exxon in New Jersey reported the results of a similar experiment using a similar device.
But dr. Smalley eventually agreed to try it, and the three professors, along with Dr. Heath and two graduate students began their work.
Indeed, they discovered the long carbon chains that Dr. Kroto had wanted to find.
They also found something else: the buckyballs.
dr. Heath said that Dr. Curl instilled a healthy dose of skepticism during the 11-day whirlwind of discovery.
“We were all just excited kids,” said Dr. heath. “And Bob was like the adult in the room. And he came up with reasons why we should go back and test and make sure this was right or that was right. We all didn’t see Bob as being a devil’s advocate — more like he was an insurance policy. If Bob agreed with you, you were probably right.’
It turned out that the Exxon experiments also created small numbers of buckyballs, but those researchers had overlooked them in their data. At Rice, the scientists realized what they had found.
“If Mother Nature is trying to tell you something, you have to listen,” Dr. Curl himself in an interview with Rice University in 2016 to mark the 20th anniversary of his Nobel Prize.
While Dr. Kroto and Dr. Smalley further buckyball research, Dr. Curl quickly to other areas of interest. In the 2016 interview, he recalled going to Dr. Smalley went and found his colleague filling binders with papers about buckyballs.
“I don’t want to have a full-time job in any field to keep up with the literature,” said Dr. curl. “That’s why I left that area.”
Not many practical applications have been found for buckyballs, but other related forms, such as nanotubes (coiled tubes of carbon) and graphene (an atom-thick sheets of carbon) have shown promise.
In 2010, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope discovered buckyballs in interstellar space.
In recent years, Dr. Curl focused on economics and worked on mathematical models to study things like energy production and automation.
Robert Floyd Curl Jr. was born on August 23, 1933 in Alice, Texas. His father was a Methodist minister who helped found the Methodist Hospital in San Antonio. His mother, Lessie, was a housewife.
“When I was 9 years old, my parents gave me a chemistry set,” wrote Dr. Curl in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel Foundation. “Within a week I decided to become a chemist and have never deviated from that choice.”
In 1954, he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Rice, then known as the Rice Institute. He received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. After a postdoctoral position at Harvard, he returned to Rice in 1958 as an assistant professor.
In 1967 he became a full professor. He retired in 2005, although he continued to work for many years.
dr. Curl married Jonel Whipple in 1955. Among his survivors are his wife; two sons, Michael and David; and three grandchildren.
After Dr. Curl had won the Nobel Prize, Malcolm Gillis, when Rice’s president asked him what he wanted, perhaps worried that larger institutions might want to hire him from the university.
dr. Curl asked for a bike rack near his office.
“He was an incredibly humble man,” said Dr. Heath, adding that Dr. Curl got his bike rack.