FROM BUCKYBALLS TO USED CARS

CHEMISTRY

Skeptical eyebrows were raised in 1985 when three chemists reported that they had stumbled onto a new form of molecular carbon that they believed, but could not prove, had the shape of a soccer ball. Nobody is skeptical anymore. Not only has their theory been confirmed, but it has blossomed into a thriving branch of research. And last week that trio of chemists--Harold Kroto from Britain's University of Sussex, and Robert Curl and Richard Smalley from Rice University in Houston--were rewarded for their work with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

They made their serendipitous discovery by zapping graphite with a laser beam and mixing the resulting carbon vapor with a stream of helium. When they examined the crystallized residue, they found molecules made of 60 carbon atoms. Guessing (correctly) that these structures resembled Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, they named them "buckminsterfullerenes"--"buckyballs" for short.

Today scientists manufacture buckyballs by the pound and in a variety of sizes and shapes, from flat sheets to long filaments. Some can hold atoms of other elements in their hollow interiors; others can conduct electricity. Given the versatility of buckyballs, scientists predict that they will someday be used for, among other things, drug-delivery systems, superfine electrical wires and hairlike tubes of unprecedented tensile strength.

PHYSICS

Cornell University researchers David Lee, Robert Richardson and Douglas Osheroff made their Nobel-winning discovery in 1972. They were working with helium-3, a rare isotope of the common gas, looking for a "phase transition," analogous to the changes in water when it turns from vapor to liquid and from liquid to ice. They had cooled a sample to within two one-thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (-459.67[degrees] F), the temperature at which atomic motion ceases.

As they were charting the changing pressures, the Nobel citation states, "it was Osheroff's vigilant eye that noticed small extra jumps in the curve." Those jumps, it turned out, represented the change of helium-3 into a superfluid, a liquid with no viscosity that can climb up and over the walls of its container and exhibits other bizarre quantum behavior ordinarily observed only in subatomic particles.

The discovery may turn out to have repercussions on a far grander scale. Subsequent experiments with superfluid helium-3 have lent support to the theory that the creation of hypothetical structures called cosmic strings a fraction of a second after the Big Bang led eventually to the formation of the galaxies.

PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE

For decades, the best minds in immunology had failed to solve this riddle: Why did the immune system evolve to reject something--an organ transplant--that didn't become common until the 20th century? In the 1970s a couple of outsiders, working in relative isolation in Australia, hit on the answer. Australian Peter Doherty, who trained as a veterinary surgeon, and Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel, a Swiss specialist in tropical diseases, figured out that the rejection response was actually a by-product of the body's basic virus-defense system.

Doherty and Zinkernagel showed that the white blood cells of the immune system look for changes in a key marker called the self protein, which identifies cells as belonging to one's own body. Any alterations in this protein--such as those that occur when a cell is invaded by a virus--tag the cell for destruction. Doherty and Zinkernagel's research, which won this year's Physiology or Medicine Nobel, could lead to new kinds of vaccines against cancer, multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune disorders.

ECONOMICS

Anyone who has bought a used car knows that the seller typically has far more information than the buyer. That's why states have lemon laws. Such gaps in information lie at the heart of the work for which James Mirrlees of Britain's Cambridge University, and formerly Oxford, and William Vickrey of Columbia University shared this year's Nobel for Economics. By studying the "asymmetric information" that characterizes many markets, the two men, who have never met, demolished the classic economic assumption that all parties to a deal have equal knowledge.

Each economist sketched ways to put his theoretical findings to practical use. Mirrlees, 60, who has taught in Africa, Pakistan and the U.S., devised an income-tax system that was intended to provide the maximum amount of revenue. And to the surprise of this former adviser to Britain's Labour Party, his own theory led to the conclusion that a progressive tax is not necessarily the best.

Vickrey, 82, designed a novel auction method in which bids are sealed and the winner pays what the second-highest bidder offered; a version of this is used by the U.S. Treasury to sell notes. Vickrey also urged railways and utilities to prevent congestion by charging peak rates at the busiest times of day, a practice that has now become routine.

The Canadian-born Vickrey, who died while driving to a conference three days after winning the prize, was known for his voracious curiosity and sometimes eccentric behavior. He often roller-skated from Manhattan's 125th Street train station to his classes on the Columbia campus and enjoyed sitting in on colleagues' lectures and asking pointed questions. He was keenly aware of the passage of time. "I have left undone many things that I ought to have done," he once wrote, "and can only hope that there is enough health left in me to make good some of the deficiency."