Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.

After a few years of intensive research, we found a way to use a pulsed laser directed into a nozzle to vaporize any material, allowing for the first time the atoms of any element in the periodic table to be produced cold in a supersonic beam.

My interest in science had many roots. Some came from my mother as she finished her B.A. degree studies in college while I was in my early teens.

Richard Smalley Quotes