With buckytubes, you have incredible strength, perhaps 100 times that of steel, and conductivity better than copper. That's inherent in the carbon atoms you stick together in just this way. If nature had to build a living cell, with macroscopic globs of glue, it would never work. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. You put the last atom in, and it's done.
Nature does things with moleculer perfection.
We'd dearly like to. But there may be some fundamental reason why no organism that lives in water will ever be able to make a buckytube. Maybe we are nature's way of making buckytubes. The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.