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Meteoric fullerenes?
Roger Taylor one of the original team at the University of Sussex that discovered the fullerenes has now reported that fullerenes are not found in ancient meteorite deposits as some researchers had previously claimed. The discovery sheds a different light on a recent patent refusal.
Extracts of material from New Zealand dating back to a meteor impact 65 million years - during the Cretaceous-Tertiary, K-T - period were thought to contain fullerenes because of intriguing peaks in their chromatograms. Now, Taylor and colleague Ala'a Abdul-Sada have put paid to this idea with some common sense and a new analysis of the material.
Taylor points out that any fullerenes that fell to earth with the meteor impact would have been spread very thinly. This means they would have degraded within a few days given their known oxidative instability. This coupled with the fact that even if they did survive a few days their survival over millions of years would be incredible. The team has now carried out a new and detailed chromatographic and mass spectral analysis of the original material and found no telling evidence of fullerenes at all even down to the 0.001 parts per billion trace level.
Intriguingly, Donald Huffman and Wolfgang Kraetschmer who synthesised [60]fullerene first were refused a patent from the US patent office recently on the basis that fullerenes existed in nature, a supposition based on the original K-T evidence. Taylor's study counters this evidence so might leave the US PTO decision wide open to appeal.
Reference:
R. Taylor and A. K. Abdul-Sada, Fullerene Sci. & Technol., 2000, 8, 47.
