Sometimes Science, like other overglamorized forms of human endeavor, marches on its stomach.

As I write this, pure buckyballs are sold commercially for about $2000 a gram, but the market price is in free-fall. Chemists suggest that buckmisterfullerene will be as cheap as aluminum some day soon -- a few bucks a pound. Buckyballs will be a bulk commodity, like oatmeal. You may even *eat* them some day -- they're not poisonous, and they seem to offer a handy way to package certain drugs.

Buckminsterfullerene may have been "born" in an interstellar star-lab, but it'll become a part of everyday life, your life and my life, like nylon, or latex, or polyester. It may become more famous, and will almost certainly have far more social impact, than Buckminster Fuller's own geodesic domes, those glamorously high-tech structures of the 60s that were the prophetic vision for their molecule-size counterparts.

This whole exciting buckyball scrimmage will almost certainly bring us amazing products yet undreamt-of, everything from grease to superhard steels. And, inevitably, it will bring a concomitant set of new problems -- buckyball junk, perhaps, or bizarre new forms of pollution, or sinister military applications. This is the way of the world.

But maybe the most remarkable thing about this peculiar and elaborate process of scientific development is that buckyballs never were really "exotic" in the first place. Now that sustained attention has been brought to bear on the phenomenon, it appears that buckyballs are naturally present -- in tiny amounts, that is -- in almost any sooty, smoky flame. Buckyballs fly when you light a candle, they flew when Bogie lit a cigarette in "Casablanca," they flew when Neanderthals roasted mammoth fat over the cave fire. Soot we knew about, diamonds we prized -- but all this time, carbon, good ol'