Nobel Prize in Chemistry Salutes the Discovery of Conducting Polymers

In 1976, a serendipitous chain of events brought together three individuals from different academic and geographical cultures to study a curious polymer: polyacetylene. The trio soon discovered that doping this polymer can change its behavior from insulating to metallic. For that work, the three—Alan Heeger, a physicist now at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Alan MacDiarmid, a chemist from the University of Pennsylvania then specializing in inorganic chemistry; and Hideki Shirakawa, a polymer chemist who has recently retired from Japan's Tsukuba University—have now earned the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the discovery and development of conductive polymers.”