Spring 2000
Speed Demon
page 1
| 2 |
3 | 4 |
5 | 6
Working
in the realm of the infinitesimally small, chemist Jim Heath's molecular-based
computers will be billions of times more efficient than anything
we've ever imagined, holding the promise of benefits that will affect
all our lives
-----------
By Gary Taubes
Photography by John Eder
 If
there was an epiphany in the career of UCLA chemist Jim Heath, a
moment of pure revelation, it struck in September 1984, on his first
day as a graduate student in the laboratory of a Rice University
chemist and future Nobel laureate named Rick Smalley. As an undergraduate,
Heath had studied chemistry at Baylor but had gone that route mostly
because a research job in a chem lab would put spending money in
his pocket. It was not, at that time, what one might term a divine
calling.
Then
he went on to Rice and to Smalley's lab, showing up on Day One to
find himself confronted by a machine technically called a "laser-supersonic
cluster beam apparatus" and which Heath describes more simply as
"this huge, two-story contraption that had all sorts of lasers around
it and no one to run it." Smalley, who designed the device (which
was capable of vaporizing materials to study their constituent atoms
or molecules), instructed Heath in the fine points of its operation
and together they began to collect data. Late in the evening, Smalley
went home to bed and Heath stayed behind, mesmerized by the machine
and its capabilities. "At three in the morning," he recalls, "I
had to call Smalley, wake him up and ask him how to turn the machine
off. I knew," he says with a laugh, "I had found the right place
to be."
It
was almost exactly one year later that the laser-supersonic cluster
beam apparatus, with Heath at the controls, began creating the 60-carbon
atom molecule known as C60 or, more popularly, buckyballs (after
R. Buckminster Fuller, the American architect whose geodesic dome
designs have a structure similar to that atom). The creation and
discovery, which opened an entirely new branch of chemistry, led
to the Nobel Prize in 1996 for Smalley and the other two senior
collaborators, Bob Curl of Rice and Harry Kroto of the University
of Sussex in England. It also sealed Heath's reputation as a graduate
student and scientist of great promise. Such recognition might have
induced him to devote his life to the study of this remarkable family
of carbon molecules. But that wasn't Heath's style.
<next>
|
