Richard Smalley Quotes

Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear that biological evolution could not have occurred.

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.

I was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 6, 1943, one year to the day before D-Day, the allied invasion at Normandy. The youngest of four children, I was brought up in a wonderfully stable, loving family of strong Midwestern values.

If it ain't tubes, we don't do it.

Diamond, for all its great beauty, is not nearly as interesting as the hexagonal plane of graphite. It is not nearly as interesting because we live in a three-dimensional space, and in diamond, each atom is surrounded in all three directions in space by a full coordination.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

Clean water is a great example of something that depends on energy. And if you solve the water problem, you solve the food problem.

My interest in science had many roots. Some came from my mother as she finished her B.A. degree studies in college while I was in my early teens.

We'd like to make it [bucky fiber] in a continuous fiber, roll it on a drum, and go fishing with it.

Administrators and scientists are excited by buckyballs for their own sake, and if they turn out to have practical applications, so much the better.

Carbon has this genius of making a chemically stable, two-dimensional, one-atom-thick membrane in a three-dimensional world. And that, I believe, is going to be very important in the future of chemistry and technology in general.

Be a scientist, save the world.