Curl, Robert F., Jr.

Robert Curl, in full Robert Floyd Curl, Jr., (born August 23, 1933, Alice, Texas, U.S.—died July 3, 2022, Houston, Texas), American chemist who with Richard E. Smalley and Harold W. Kroto discovered buckminsterfullerene, a spherical form of carbon comprising 60 atoms, in 1985. The discovery opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.

In 1954 Curl earned a B.A. at the Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, and three years later he completed his doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the faculty at Rice in 1958 and retired as professor emeritus in 2008.

In September 1985 Curl met with Kroto, of the University of Sussex, England, and Smalley, a colleague at Rice. In 11 days of research, they discovered buckminsterfullerene, so named for the molecule’s resemblance to the geodesic domes designed by American architect R. Buckminster Fuller. They announced their findings to the public in the November 14, 1985, issue of the journal Nature.

Buckminsterfullerene —whimsically abbreviated to “buckyball”— proved to be the first of several similar forms of carbon collectively dubbed fullerenes. Since the discovery of fullerenes, research on these compounds has accelerated. Although Kroto, Curl, and Smalley discovered this fundamental new form of carbon as a synthetic product in the course of attempting to simulate the chemistry in the atmosphere of giant stars, fullerenes were later found to occur naturally in tiny amounts on Earth and in meteorites. In the 1990s a method was announced for producing buckyballs in large quantities, and practical applications appeared likely. In 1991 Science magazine named buckminsterfullerene their "molecule of the year."

Curl’s later research focused on quartz tuning forks and the development of trace-gas sensors. This research was aimed at creating sensors that could be used to generate arrays of quartz tuning forks. These arrays could then be used for the photoacoustic detection of gases. He also worked on developing improved technology that employed high-powered lasers and fluorescent dyes to sequence DNA.