What advice do you have for young people?
I do think that most young people have some creative talent. They should never do a project half-heartedly. If they find that they are satisfied with second-rate effort, than they should look for something else to do where only their best effort will satisfy them personally – not just the teacher.
The individual must be prepared to stay up to 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning to do the best they can. Then they know there is something that they are sufficiently interested in to do it for themselves and to do it to the best of their abilities. If they do follow this advice, they will probably do it better than anybody else, probably better than people who could do it better naturally but do not because they have not their enthusiasm.
I don’t believe in competition or have any interest in it. I was very satisfied with my work before we did the work that led to the Nobel Prize. That I have won the Nobel Prize is a surprise to me. You should do something that you cannot stop working on, or stop drawing, or is so absorbing that you have completely forgotten to go for lunch.
A big danger in young scientists especially in Asia is that they tend to ask me how to get the Nobel Prize. I never even thought about it. Don’t do science because you want to win prizes or do something just because you think it is important; do it because it is something that you are curious about or fascinates you personally, independently of what other might think.
The basic experiment that I suggested to the Rice Group was a rather mundane one that did not seem very important before we did it. When we actually did it it turned out to have an amazing surprise up its sleeve. It was on the face of it a very mundane experiment. I knew what the result would be yet we did it.
The result was exactly what I had expected PLUS an amazing extra bonus this discovery of a hitherto unknown form of carbon.
Sir Harold Kroto was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 together with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of a new form of carbon, the Buckminsterfullerene (C60). He was knighted in the 1996 New Year’s Honors list for his contributions to Chemistry.
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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine. Photos: www.kroto.info; Nobel Media AG.
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