Richard Smalley, 62; Nobelist, 'Father of Nanotechnology'

Richard Smalley, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who was the co-creator of the miniature spheres of carbon called buckyballs and who is widely considered the father of nanotechnology, died Friday at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Smalley, 62, had battled leukemia for several years, said a spokesman for Rice University, where he spent virtually all of his working life.

The chemist used the fame generated by the creation of the 60-carbon spheres to campaign widely for the development of nanotechnology, which would allow scientists to produce molecule-sized working machines to accomplish a variety of previously unimaginable tasks.

"These little nanothings, and the technology that assembles and manipulates them -- nanotechnology -- will revolutionize our industries and our lives," he told the U.S. House of Representatives in 1999 while arguing for the creation of the National Nanotechnology Initiative to support the research.

"Rick overwhelmingly carried the day," said Caltech chemist James Heath, a former student of Smalley's. "He sat there in front of Congress with no hair, as a result of the chemotherapy, and talked about the promise of nanotechnology for cancer and other diseases and how it would pay off for his children. It was absolutely riveting."

Federal spending for the initiative amounted to more than $1 billion this fiscal year.

Added William Barnett, a former chairman of the Rice board of trustees: "I think of Rick as the father of nanotechnology in the sense that, better than anyone else, he articulated the vision of its future and how it would impact the world. And he did so in a kind of universal language which was understandable and inspiring to everyone."

Smalley's seminal work grew out of his studies in the 1970s using the then-new tunable dye lasers to analyze the structures of simple molecules. Because the analysis was very difficult with rapidly spinning molecules at room temperature, the researchers used a technique called supersonic jet expansion to cool them, slowing or stopping the rotation.

In the technique, which is a sophisticated version of the method used to cool Freon in air conditioners, a gas was allowed to expand at high speed into a near-vacuum, producing a cooling effect and slowing the molecular rotations to allow laser analysis.