is a native of Kansas. He obtained his B.A. degree from Pomona College in 1949 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry with D. J. Cram at UCLA in 1953. After postdoctoral work with George S. Hammond and several years in industry with Rohm and Haas he became Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside, in 1962, and he later returned to UCLA in that same capacity in 1969. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Inorganic Chemistry since 1969. He is the recipient of many honors including election to the National Academy of Sciences, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and as a Corresponding Member of the Goettingen Academy of Sciences. Most recently (1997) he was the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences. His research interests lie at the interfaces of inorganic, organic, and biochemistry and most often involve the elaboration of polyhedral borane and carborane chemistry as a central theme. Zhiping Zheng was born in Fujian, China, in 1967 and obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Peking University. He continued his graduate training in the United States, first at Tulane University and then under the guidance of Professor Hawthorne at UCLA where the work described in this Account was carried out. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1995, he became a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Richard H. Holm at Harvard University. He is just beginning an independent academic career at the University of Arizona.

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The triple sequentially fused pentagons (TSFP) motif is one of the basic subunits that could be used for constructing fullerenes, but it violates the isolated pentagon rule (IPR) and has not been found in carbon cages to date. The properties of TSFP-incorporating fullerenes are thus poorly explored both theoretically and experimentally. Reported herein are four chlorinated derivatives of three different fullerene cages, all with the TSFP motif. X-ray crystallographic analyses indicate that the molecular strain inherent to the pentagon adjacency of a TSFP is significantly relieved upon exohedral chlorination, leaving one of the four pentagon fusion sites unsaturated and rendering the present derivatives chiral. This unique reactivity, in stark contrast to that of previously reported non-IPR fullerenes containing double fused pentagons or triple directly fused pentagons, can be rationalized by density functional theory calculations, and are expected to stimulate further studies of these new members of the fullerene family, both theoretically and experimentally.

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