- Person
- Harry Kroto
- Lived
- 1939–2016
- Field
- Chemistry
- From
- British
The story
Harry Kroto was born in 1939 to parents who had fled Nazi Germany; his father was Jewish, and the family arrived in Britain having lost almost everything. He grew up in a poor part of Bolton and owed his chance in life to a good school and inspiring teachers. After he became famous as a co-discoverer of the carbon molecule C60, he spent a large part of the rest of his life trying to give other young people the same chance.
In 1995, together with the BBC producer Patrick Reams, Kroto founded the Vega Science Trust, a British educational charity. Vega made science films of broadcast quality: lectures, discussions and interviews with leading scientists, including many Nobel laureates, designed to convey not just the excitement of discovery but the underlying ideas needed to understand it. Some were shown on BBC television, and the trust also preserved recordings of Royal Institution discourses. Vega produced more than 280 programmes, which it streamed free from its website, acting as a kind of science television channel, until it closed in 2012.
When Kroto moved to Florida State University in 2004, he started a second project, GEOSET, the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineering and Technology. It is an online collection of recorded teaching modules and science talks that teachers, students and the public can watch and download free of charge. The idea was that a good teacher’s lesson, once recorded, could reach a classroom anywhere in the world.
Kroto also ran hands-on buckyball workshops in which children built models of carbon molecules, and he visited schools tirelessly. In his Nobel autobiography he said some of his greatest satisfaction came from conversations with schoolchildren, teachers and lay people fascinated by science. He warned that if hands-on science education declined, society would struggle to meet the challenges of the century. He died in 2016.
Why it matters
Kroto’s free films and lessons opened top-quality science teaching to students, teachers and curious people worldwide, whatever their means.
About Harry Kroto
Son of a Jewish refugee from Berlin who co-discovered the football-shaped carbon molecule C60, launching carbon nanoscience, and gave the world free science films and lessons. Nobel Prize 1996.
More about Harry Kroto
Sources
- Sir Harold Kroto, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Buckyball pioneer Harold Kroto dies at 76 Physics World
- Harry Kroto Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.