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Nobel laureate Hideki Shirakawa wrote in a
junior high school essay that he dreamed of creating new kinds
of plastics. Shirakawa later earned his bachelor's, master's,
and doctoral degrees from Tokyo Tech and served on the university's
faculty. In 1967, he noticed the formation of polyacetylene
film that possessed a metallic luster after a colleague's experiment
had gone awry.
The silvery film captured the attention of Professor Alan
MacDiarmid, who invited Shirakawa to the University of Pennsylvania
for the 1976–77 academic year. Also at that university
was Alan Heeger, later of the University of California at Santa
Barbara. Shirakawa, MacDiarmid, and Heeger would share the
2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of electrically
conductive polymers. |
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| In the upper glass receptacle
is a sample of the kind of polyacetylene film that Shirakawa
(above) discovered at Tokyo Tech—a discovery
that would help earn a Nobel Prize. The lower receptacle
contains granular polyacetylene. |
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