A pair of scissors, a legal pad, a late night beer. All ordinary items, but together they helped an extraordinary tool-nanotechnology-take its first steps out of the realm of theory and into practice.

It started with stardust. In 1985, University of Sussex astronomer Harry Kroto teamed up with Rice University chemists Richard Smalley and Robert Curl to study the structure of carbon molecules on the surface of red giant stars. Along with graduate students James Heath and Sean O'Brien, they mimicked star conditions by zapping carbon with lasers and found something unexpected: a high proportion of extremely stable clusters with 60 carbon atoms each. Someone in the group-nobody remembers who-suggested each cluster might be a single molecule shaped like a hollow ball.