For some time interest in Buckminsterfullerene, the unique form of carbon created at my alma mater, has focused on Buckytubes, not Buckyballs.

A Buckyball is a single carbon-60 molecule, shaped like a tiny soccer ball. If you don't cut off the ends, and instead extend the shape into a tube, you have a molecule of almost limitless size, and with enormous strength. A space elevator, as I conceive it, is basically a circled Buckytube that reaches from a point at the Equator to geosynchronous orbit, so that a cab coming up one way is matched by one going down.

But in the short run that's science fiction. There is a lot of proof-of-concept work to do before you can really go after the money, and there we're talking of billions-and-billions.

What Buckminsterfullerene needs, more than anything, is a profitable market that will spur further development.

And now it has found one.

The market is medicine. With the merger of CNI, which has a lot of the patent portfolio but was working mainly with tubes, and C60, which was working mainly with the balls, you have an outfit with the heft to go after the profits to be found in fullerenes' ability to attract free radicals.

Free radicals are important beecause many researchers now believe they play a generalized part in the development of many diseases, including cancer. If Buckyballs can act as little magnets and attract these radicals, then expel them as they themselves are expelled, you can eliminate disease before it gets going, or shut off the disease process altogether, quickly and painlessly.

The work is important for a second reason. Unless a profitable demand can be found for fullerenes more won't be made. CNI has scaled back its 2005 production target from 1,000 pounds of the stuff to 100, despite having come up with a new manufacturing process (using carbon monoxide) that cuts the costs of making them.

Whether carbon-60 will become an industry or remain a curiousity is at stake. Profits must be found, and soon.

Merck is backing the medical play. So go for it.