Over a feverish 10-day period in 1985, scientists conceived of a new molecule of perfect symmetry — and named it after one of the 20th century’s most famous inventors and futurists.

The hunt started in the 1970s when Harry Kroto, a lab chemist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., was puzzling over the discovery of a primordial soup of organic molecules in the “vast dark clouds that lie between the stars,” Kroto said in his Nobel Prize speech.