THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, SCIENCE SECTION , May 4th, 1998 ran a provocative article called: "Whatever Happened to the Buckyball?" by SUSAN WARREN, Staff Reporter. It is our hope to get permission to post the whole article. Here are some briefs quotes which will give you some sense of the directions it takes:

"From the moment the buckyball bounced onto the scene in 1985, it dazzled scientists with its perfect symmetry, sensational curves and alluring hollow core..... Physicists, chemists and materials scientists foresaw a vast universe of lucrative commercial uses, from finely tuned pharmaceuticals to broad-based industrial applications.

"But today the buckyball is landing with a thud.....For many scientists - and industry in general - that is a letdown.

"Tracing the rise and fall of buckyballs offers a view of the hurdles a discovery must leap to make it to the marketplace. First of all, to be a commercial success, a new material must do something better or more cheaply than anything else.

"But that leads to the old chicken-and-egg problem. Without a major industrial use, there is no incentive to spend lots of money figuring out how to make buckyballs cost less. But unless they cost less, they can't seem to find a commercial use.

"Though prices have dropped over the years, buckyballs, still cost from $25 to $200 a gram, depending on their purity. That's something like $11,000 or more a pound. For any commercially viable product, buckyballs need to cost well under $100 a pound.

"Some think the best potential for buckyballs remains in medicine..... But so far, researchers haven't gotten far enough to know how well that works.

"It may be too early to drop the buckyball altogether. Decades can pass before a commercial use is found for some new materials. 'Nuclear magnetic resonance was strictly a scientific curiosity for decades, and now it's one of the biggest things in medicine,' says Donald Huffman, physics professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, who in 1990 found a way to actually make microscopic buckyballs so that scientists could begin studying them."

See also:
C 60 Molecule - Buckminsterfullerene
Wall Street Journal site