Guest post by JessTheChemist
Scientists have a responsibility, or at least I feel I have a responsibility, to ensure that what I do is for the benefit of the human race’ – Harry Kroto
Thank you for your nominations for this month’s blog post. It was great to see so many of you getting involved in this series, highlighting interesting Nobel laureates for me to cover. However, I could only pick one winner, so I decided to write about Harry Kroto, inspired by this tweet from Bolton School:
@ChemistryWorld @JessTheChemist
How about Bolton School Old Boy 'Sir Harry Kroto'?
— BoltonSchoolChem (@Chem_BoltonSch) August 20, 2014
Harry Kroto has a formidable CV. Not only is he a highly distinguished and talented chemist, but he does a great deal to improve the teaching of chemistry to future generations. This has included setting up the not-for-profit Vega Science Trust, which helps scientists communicate with the public at large, and even returning to his childhood school to build Buckyballs with students.
Kroto began his career at the University of Sheffield where he gained his PhD in high resolution electronic spectra of radicals. After time spent in Canada and the USA, he returned to the UK – to the University of Sussex – to begin his independent research career. His research concentrated on the identification of carbon chains in the interstellar medium, which included work at Rice University, where Kroto and colleagues, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl, discovered the existence of C60 or Buckminsterfullerene. The discovery itself has become a well known scientific story, recently retold by Rowena Fletcher-Wood here on the Chemistry World blog. After numerous publications on the subject, Curl, Kroto and Smalley were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996 ‘for their discovery of fullerenes’. As with many other Nobel laureates, there’s a detailed biography of Kroto published by the Nobel foundation here.
Kroto is related to a number of influential scientists. He is distantly related to Roger Kornberg, who won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2006 for his work on the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. Kornberg was lucky enough to work for the Nobel prize winner, Francis Crick, who famously contributed to the proposal that DNA had a double helical structure, along with James Watson.
Kroto’s academic partners and fellow Nobel prize winners, Curl and Smalley also have impressive scientific pedigree. Curl’s academic father was E. Bright Wilson, a pioneer in spectroscopy, and grandfather was Linus Pauling, who won both the Nobel prize in chemistry and the Nobel peace prize. Curl is also academic brother to Dudley Herschbach, winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1986 for contributions towards the molecular dynamics of elementary chemical processes. Hershbach shared the prize with the Hungarian-Canadian chemist John Polanyi and Yuan T. Lee, the first person from Taiwan to be awarded a Nobel prize. Smalley is academically descended from William Lipscomb, who took the 1976 Nobel prize in chemistry for his contributions to borane chemistry. Not shown in our family tree are Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath, who both went on to win Nobel prizes after time spent in Lipscomb’s lab. Lipscomb also demonstrated his sense of humour by regularly presenting at the Ig Nobel awards. Curl is also connected to Peter Atkins, author of undergraduate students’ favourite physical chemistry textbook!
As you can see, Kroto has an eclectic lineage, and rich academic family history, from chemical biologists to physical chemists. Do you want to know what your academic genealogy is? If so, head to academictree.org, where you can add yourself to the website and start creating your very own tree.
