The battle of the moleculesAustin, Texas - Nothing's too small for politicians to debate. Even molecules. Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, apparently thought his idea of making Rice University's Nobel Prize-winning "buckyball" the official Texas molecule would glide through the Legislature unopposed.
But Hochberg, a Rice alum and an electrical engineer tutored in the arguments of science, should have known better.
University of Texas chemist Jonathan Sessler has another candidate for the Texas title: his Texaphyrin, a 9-year-old, engineered molecule undergoing tests as a delivery system for anti-cancer drugs.
For one thing, Sessler says buckyballs - the whimsically nicknamed form of carbon discovered by Rice chemists Rick Smalley and Robert Curl - belong to nature and, therefore, aren't specifically Texan. Sessler, on the other hand, designed his Texaphyrin, for which a patent is pending, in the shape of a two-dimensional Frisbee with a five-point Lone Star in the middle of it.
"The buckyball is like the Hope diamond," Sessler said. "The scientists picked it up and polished it. But that's a very different kind of beauty than the Sistine Chapel, which came out of a person's brain and hand."
Source: Houston Chronicle |
