Austin, Texas – Nothings too small for politicians to debate. Even molecules. Rep. Scott Hochberg, D-Houston, apparently thought his idea of making Rice Universitys 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, arent 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 thats a very different kind of beauty than the Sistine Chapel, which came out of a persons brain and hand.

Source: Houston Chronicle