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TRIESTE, Italy, Dec. 17, 2003 — When Sir Harold Kroto recently took the stage at Trieste’s Giuseppe Verdi Theater at the recent EuroNanoForum, it was before a full house of nanocognoscente. Every one of the seats in the horseshoe- shaped traditional Italian theater was taken by an audience member intently drinking the words coming from the small figure up front.
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That’s because Kroto is a rock star of sorts, at least in the small tech world. In fact, the British native has, like some of the island’s more-famous musical rock stars, achieved knighthood. Among his other many awards is his 1996 Nobel Prize in chemistry, shared with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their 1985 discovery of buckminsterfullerenes. Those are the carbon spheres that look a little like soccer balls that have generated great excitement because they have the potential to transform areas as diverse as computing and pharmaceuticals.
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Yet the 64-year-old Kroto, seems unruffled by all the hoopla surrounding him. He still considers himself a fundamental scientist looking for answers.
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“Some people go with a specific goal in mind, like Columbus looking for America, but just I try to understand things,” he says. “If something good happens, that’s good — if it’s something useful, it’s even better.” Kroto says he discovered C60 quite by accident, and that is how he plans to continue with his research.
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Right now, he is most interested in what we can learn from molecular biology. For example, how does the human body’s hemoglobin, a protein found in the blood, transport oxygen from the lungs to other tissues, allowing the body to move and carry on life’s activities? “That is what I consider my vision of nanotechnology in the 21st century,” he said. “We will look at the body and learn to make our nanomachines.”
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Kroto recalls that as a child he was always the kid with the funny name in class, who did his best to merge into the background. At the time, the name was Krotoschiner, until his father shortened it in 1955. His parents had come to Britain as refugees from Berlin during the 1930s. He grew up in the town of Bolton in northwest England, a region that made its mark in textiles during the industrial revolution.
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One of his first hands-on chemistry experiences took place in his father’s small balloon-making factory, where he worked during school holidays. “I was called upon to fill in everywhere, from mixing latex dyes to repairing the machinery and replacing the workers on the production line,” he wrote in his Nobel autobiography. “I only now realize what an outstanding training ground this had been for the development of the problem-solving skills needed by a research scientist.”
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As Kroto grew older, he naturally gravitated toward chemistry, physics and math, obtaining both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Sheffield, where he studied “Electronic Spectroscopy of Unstable Molecules.” For him, being a nanoscientist and a chemist are one and the same. He says he worked on nanosciences long before the term was coined. “Everything that is molecular and atomic could be considered nanotechnology today.”
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Kroto is very concerned that some parts of society are getting excited about small tech for the wrong reasons. He fears some of the new technologies may be misused, particularly in the area of military applications.
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“All science, all technology can be used for the benefit or the human race or to its detriment and this technology is so powerful, we could get rid of ourselves,” he warns.
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Kroto says he has three religions: atheism, humanism and Amnesty International. In pragmatic terms, that means he would like small tech used to find a solution to malaria, which kills over a million people a year, according to the World Health Organization. DDT saved the lives of millions of people, he points out, noting that the chemical, banned in the United States since 1973, also produced many negative side effects. “It’s possible for biotechnology to one day replace DDT” he says, “and that’s one of the priorities I think our society should be taking on.”
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His all-encompassing approach to science impressed many in the audience, like 26-year-old Giorgio Prosperi, a chemistry graduate who attended the event to find out more about small tech. “He was amazing, because he really gives the impression he has an open mind and that he is thinking about all of nanotechnology’s implications,” he said.
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Stimulating the interest of the young is another of Kroto’s pet projects, to the point where he started a company called Vega Science Trust with BBC producer Patrick Reams in the mid-1990s. It’s a registered charity, which creates science films for broadcast.
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Gill Watson, the trust’s CEO, says Kroto’s strong will was instrumental in bringing the project to life.
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“He has a tremendous thirst for changing people’s perception of science, from that of something negative to something positive,” she said.
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It’s no surprise, then, that he closed his presentation in Trieste with a short film of him working on large-size replicas of fullerenes with school kids in Mexico during one of Vega’s outreach events. “We need to get our kids to understand nanotechnology, because we are going to need them,” Kroto concluded.