Tuesday, October 10, 2000
Fantasy materializes for Penn chemistry professor
Alan G. MacDiarmid shares the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with two collaborators. They developed polymers that conduct electricity, which have wide uses in computer and video displays.
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| Alan G. MacDiarmid, shown in an undated file photo, shares the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with two collaborators. |
REUTERS
Alan G. MacDiarmid, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry today for developing polymer plastics that conduct electricity, likened his winning the award to gambling.
"One always fantasizes. ... It's the same as going to a casino and hoping to win, but one never really expects one's fantasy to materialize," said MacDiarmid, 73, a chemistry professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
He said that when he first heard the news from a colleague, who had seen it on the Internet, he didn't believe it.
"My first reaction was that it was a hoax. I couldn't quite believe it," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.
The New Zealand-born MacDiarmid, Blanchard Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania; Alan Heeger, 64, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Japan's Hideki Shirakawa, 64, of the University of Tsukuba, share the prize, worth nine million Swedish crowns ($913,700) this year.
Their work has important practical uses since conductive plastics can be used for anti-static substances for photographic film, shields for computer screens against electromagnetic radiation and "smart" windows that can exclude sunlight.
They can also be used for solar cells, mobile phone displays and mini-format television screens.
Plastic is usually thought of as not conducting electricity, and is used to insulate copper wires in ordinary electric cables.
But Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa, in seminal findings at the end of the 1970s, discovered conductive polymers - synthetic metals or plastics that repeat their structure regularly in long chains. They also developed the study of polymers into an important research field for chemists and physicists.
MacDiarmid said he did not have any specific plans for his share of the award.
"I guess I would like to use it in some way to promote and help some aspect of education," he said.
"Well, I could presumably buy a couple of meals of filet mignon, instead of hamburger," he added.
MacDiarmid has been on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania since 1955 and has devoted more than 20 years to the study of conducting polymers.
He received his masters in science from the University of New Zealand in 1950 and has three doctorates: one from the University of Wisconsin in 1953, one from the Cambridge University in 1955, and an honorary one from Sweden's Linkoping University in 1990.
He said that the award was the result of collaborating with students and his two co-winners, Shirakawa and Heeger, who worked together at the University of Pennsylvania 25 years ago on chemistry and electrical chemistry.
Shirakawa - the first Japanese to win a Nobel science prize since 1987 - was researching polymers in the early 1970s, while MacDiarmid, now a U.S. citizen, and Heeger were working in a similar area.
Shirakawa, who stumbled on the first conductive plastic when he accidentally added 1,000 times too much of a chemical to a mixture, got talking to MacDiarmid during a coffee break in a seminar in Tokyo. Soon after, the three started to collaborate.
Of the award, MacDiarmid, who still carries a full teaching load, said, "This gives me the stimulus to go on for another 20 to 25 years."
More information can be found at Dr. MacDiarmid's departmental web page at the University of Pennsylvania's Chemistry Department.