Harold Kroto was still a schoolboy when he developed what he calls "an unhealthy interest" in chemistry. "Like almost all chemists," he says, he was "attracted by the smells and bangs that endowed chemistry with that slight but charismatic element of danger." He earned his bachelor's and doctor's degrees at Sheffield University. After postdoctoral work in Canada and at Bell Labs in the United States, he returned to England and settled at the University of Sussex, where he is now Royal Society Research Professor.

Over a period of 11 days in 1985, Kroto and his associates produced two previously unknown forms of the element carbon. Formerly, only six crystalline forms of the element were known, including the two forms of graphite, and two kinds of diamond. One of the new forms, a 60-atom molecule (C60) displayed a highly stable symmetrical structure resembling the pattern of a soccer ball, or the geodesic dome designed by the American architect R. Buckminster Fuller. In Fuller's honor, the researchers named it buckminsterfullerene.

The 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dr. Kroto and his associates for these discoveries, which have resulted in an entirely new branch of chemistry, with enormous consequences in such diverse areas as astrochemistry and superconductivity. Later that year, Harold Kroto was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to science.