[Udo]

It is being produced for research purposes, so I guess you could ask at your local university lab where they sourced it. But caution is in order: the experiment described in the article was intended to find out about the toxicity of BF C60. Given that many of its chemically-similar relatives are indeed highly toxic, it's probably not a good idea to ingest this stuff yet. Six rats don't prove this substance is harmless.

[yummyfajitas]

Just curious, what are it's chemically similar relatives? I'm no chemist, but I thought the only thing remotely similar to c60 is graphite (which is harmless).

[Udo]

Carbon nanostructures have been shown to embed themselves as fibres into tissues, causing irritation and possibly cancer. So even if buckyballs are themselves harmless, likely carbon contaminants from the production process might not be. The balls also have a tendency to encase small molecules within them, and then delivering those encased substances directly into the human cell. So special care would have to be taken that the buckies are really "empty". That's all under the assumption the C60s are themselves non-toxic.

Some fullerene compound substances are toxic, but the C60 pure fullerene seems to be OK so far. Still, I wouldn't bet my life on it. If, for example, the C60 bucky would have a toxicity mechanism comparable to carbon nanotubes, that may be damage unlikely to show up during the limited lifetime of a rat - but it may well be much more relevant to humans who live 30 times as long!