Dr. Richard Smalley passed away last week.

Few men have ever transformed an institution as profoundly as Dr. Smalley transformed my alma mater, Rice University in Houston.

It started before he got there. When I was an undergraduate I went to a little talk at Hamman Hall, then the largest theater on campus, by Buckminster Fuller. Bucky was amazing. I left with a buzz in my head the likes of which I have seldom experienced. So, I am certain, did many others.

As my senior year began Dr. Richard Smalley joined the Chemistry Department. He taught freshman Chem Lab. He seemed unremarkable. But over the next half-dozen years he gathered together a strong team, from a variety of disciplines, and in the mid-1980s his team found the molecule that would make his reputation, a 60-atom form of carbon, shaped just like a soccer ball, which everyone immediately dubbed the BuckyBall, after Fuller. Its formal name was Buckmisterfullerene.

It was what Smalley did after receiving his 1996 Nobel Prize, alongside Dr. Robert Curl (my wife's chem lab prof) and Dr. Harry Kroto of England, which made him unique.
Instead of taking the money and running, either into retirement, or toward fame, or into a bigger, better-funded school, he remained at the center of Rice. His Center for Nanotechnology Science and Technology has proven an incredibly open, alive scientific environment, best-known to outsiders for its wealth of great women scientists, like Dr. Naomi Halas. Far more important, however, is the breadth of disciplines Smalley brought together.

Look at this roster. Yes there are biochemical engineers and chemical engineers, there are chemists and physicists. But there are also economists, a philosopher, an anthropologist, even a religious studies professor. There aren't honorary positions. This is an integrated team. By bringing multiple disciplines together, with various ways of looking at scientific theory and results, the chances of a breakthrough are greatly enhanced.

That approach is now starting to bear real fruit.

Some of that fruit is finny, like the world's smallest car. Some of it is dead serious, like gold "nano bullets" that might have saved Dr. Smalley's own life, had the discovery come a decade earlier.

More important, Dr. Smalley left a huge "bench" of great scientists, a transformative legacy that could yet make Rice the center of a new Silicon Valley. Who knows where this is heading -- scientifically, economically, of institutionally? I don't know.

But I do know that the Rice I graduated from was a nice little college that concentrated on undergraduate education, while today's Rice is a research power, a major player on the scientific map.

John F. Kennedy once spoke at Rice, in 1961. He announced the race to the Moon there. That race ended when the U.S. won. The race begun by Dr. Richard Smalley, on the other hand, has barely begun.