Graceful, Humane — Even After Missing a Nobel Prize
J.V. Yakhmi
Every year, human ingenuity for making fundamental discoveries, creativity in writing and efforts made towards enduring peace for the benefits of humankind comes to the fore, and is honoured at a glittering award ceremony of Nobel Prizes on December 10. That also reminds us of path-breaking efforts and discoveries made by those individuals, who missed this honour. The case of Prof. Eiji Ōsawa is conspicuous, in this regard.
On the occasion of my retirement, an International Conference, “Physics of Emerging Materials” was organized during Sep. 22–24, 2010 at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai, where I had served as an active scientist for 45 years. Among the participants were 20 subject experts invited from across the world to deliver talks at this Conference. I wanted the Inaugural talk to be delivered by Prof. Eiji Ōsawa, the famous computational chemist from Japan who was the first person, in 1970, to propose the existence of a stable C60 molecule, later called Fullerene, and even its football-like structure.
I had known about the scientific contributions of Prof. Ōsawa over the years, and had even visited his labs at Toyohashi Institute of Technology at Toyohashi in Japan on three occasions. He is a very warm and gracious person. Therefore, I was a bit surprised when he replied that he found it difficult to travel for two reasons: (i) after his retirement in 2001, he was quite busy in running an R & D company, Nanocarbon Research Institute, Ltd, started by him at Shinshu University in Ueda, Japan, and (ii) he had given up long travels at his age, then 75. However, at my further insistence, he agreed to attend the Conference as a special gesture of friendship to me. He delivered the Inaugural talk on Dispersed Nano-Diamonds. While introducing him to the audience, I stated that all the three 1996 Chemistry Nobel laureates, namely Profs. R.F. Curl, H.W. Kroto and R.E. Smalley, who won it ‘for their discovery of a new form of the element carbon, the fullerenes’, had paid rich tributes in their respective Nobel lectures to Prof. Ōsawa for conceiving the C60 molecule and its structure much before they observed it experimentally in 1985.
Unfortunately, the original work on C60, referred to by them was published by Prof. Ōsawa in 1970 in a Japanese language research journal called Kagaku. Due to the language barrier, this original discovery was not noticed by the western world of science, costing Ōsawa the Nobel. What was worse, contemporary scientists in Japan also didn’t take much interest in his discovery, and he couldn’t get anyone to synthesize the stable C60 molecule predicted by him either, in order to establish his claim, experimentally. Being graceful and having a cool temperament, Prof. Ōsawa took the loss of a Nobel in his stride.
Did he ever feel dejected with the events that led to his loss of the Nobel Prize? Yes, but only once, when he first read the 1985 publication in Nature on C60 by Kroto, Curl, Smalley and their students Heath and O’Brien, based on which the 1996 Nobel was awarded. That 1985 paper was a huge shock for him, and he very much regretted not having published his 1970 work in English. So much was his sense of loss that he felt as if his baby, the credit for the C60 molecule, has been stolen by someone. But he recovered soon, and has, in fact, been applauding the success and recognition of the abovementioned three Nobel Laureates.
I had published a popular article entitled, “Fullerenes” in Physics News (India) in 1991 giving a general update on the topic. Till then, I was not aware of the predicament of Prof. Ōsawa. My first visit to his lab at Toyohashi was on Oct. 1, 1996, when I stopped over at Toyohashi for a day after attending a Gordon Research Conference on “Organic Structures and Properties” at Fukuoka during Sept. 24-28, 1996. Prof. Ōsawa was a gracious host. He treated me well and organized my Talk on ‘Ceramic High-Tc superconductors’, at his Department. He was also very friendly and interactive during my visit. I recall asking him why he had a special chair in his room, to which he replied that he got it made specially owing to a persistent backache that he had.
He was so caring that he messaged me twice on the day before I reached Toyohashi from Kyoto that I should not take the fast Hikari or Nozomi shinkansens, but should instead take a slow Kodama train, which alone would stop at a small town like Toyohashi. Since my visit to Prof. Ōsawa’s lab was a fortnight before the announcement of the Chemistry Nobel prize on October 16, 1996, there was no occasion for me to discuss with him why he missed it.
The discovery of fullerene molecule led to the discovery of more such novel and presumably technologically important materials like carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and 2D-carbon named ‘Graphene’ and thus became the forerunner of the now popular subjects of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Hundreds of active researchers in diverse areas of science and technology still keep track of the fast-emerging field of carbon nanomaterials. In a discussion held in the year 2015, Prof. Kroto was asked what benefits the discovery of C60 had brought to the common man. His reply was ‘none’ that he knew of till then, and that the discovery was more of a fundamental nature. Prof. Ōsawa told me recently that he finds it discouraging that neither C60, nor CNTs, have so far yielded any remarkable applications, though both are beautiful structures to investigate. He believes that carbon networks are not good candidates for applications when they close into very small objects like C60, the football-shaped molecule, the inside space of which is too small. In contrast, diamond can afford huge expansion based on its tight structure, and so can graphene.
Leading researchers working on C60 always felt that the loss of credit of Prof. Ōsawa was too huge and there should be efforts to accord him a due appreciation, even though nothing can fully compensate him. A Special Issue of Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling was published in 2001 to commemorate the Thirtieth Anniversary of publication of Ōsawa’s original C60 paper in Kagaku journal. The Foreword of this Issue included a reproduction of Eiji Ōsawa’s illustration of C60 from this paper, and it had contributed papers from renowned experts on the subject, including the three 1996 Nobel laureates, Kroto, Curl and Smalley. They recalled how the news that they were not the first to conceive of the soccer ball shaped C60 got to them, and how Professor Ōsawa reacted with such stunning grace and generosity. All three recognized that Professor Ōsawa has been extremely generous in his comments on their work, and it was their turn to recognize the value of his work. One of them went to the extent of writing that the molecule that they had discovered in 1985 “had already been ‘discovered’ before in the imaginative mind of Eiji Ōsawa in 1970!”
Prof. Ōsawa’s achievement in proposing the C60 and its structure illustrates how one can go beyond a computer calculation and use one’s mind to conceive an original design of a totally new molecule. I am proud to have known Ōsawa sensei not only for his academic accomplishments but also for several human values he possesses such as approachability, humility and graciousness. Being appreciative of others is typical of Prof. Ōsawa. In May this year, I sent to him the draft of a book “My Wild Euphoria”, written by a young Indian writer, Siddhant Agrawal about the Indian wildlife, requesting him to read and give his comments. The book is illustrated by lots of pictures the author had taken during his visits to different national parks in India, and has a simple narrative. Prof. Ōsawa read the book and gave generous comments, appreciating that Siddhant, for his young age, has mature thoughts about the relationship of humans with wild animals, and has due concern about the disappearing wildlife from the world. Prof. Ōsawa also feels that as a developed country, Japan needs to be more cautious about the consequences of industrialization on the environment. He offered to make efforts to get this book available, when published, to young Japanese readers by releasing it in Japan.
