Kansans are proud to call the ornate box turtle their official reptile, while Ohioans who drink tomato juice are downing the state beverage. It was discovered by two Rice University professors, and, just months after they earned a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that discovery, a state representative from Houston is unveiling a proposal to designate the buckyball THE molecule of Texas. The legislator, Scott Hochberg, an alumnus of Rice, says he has broad support for the measure and expects it to sail through the Legislature.
Official designations can make for remarkably contentious battles.
In New York, it took a highly persistent group of fourth graders from Syracuse to prevail upon Mario Cuomo, then the governor, to sign the apple-muffin bill in 1987. New Jersey remains without an official anthem after years of legislative battles. And perhaps most famously, amid a debate that stretched back to the 19th century, the United States went without a national flower until the Reagan administration. Hochberg said he believed that Texas would be the first state with an official molecule. The buckyball, discovered in 1985 by the Rice chemists Dr. Richard E. Smalley and Dr. Robert F. Curl Jr., has a range of important possible applications, including the conducting of electricity and the delivery of medicines to precise locations within the body.