Alan MacDiarmid shared the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for the revolutionary discovery and development of plastics that conduct electricity, with Alan J. Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa.
For a polymer to conduct electricity it must be “doped”, meaning that electrons are added to or removed from some of its atoms (forming holes). These holes and extra electrons can move along the molecule to make it electrically conductive.
Shirakawa, working at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, made, by accident, a form of the polymer polyacetylene with a silvery appearance. At same time, MacDiarmid and Heeger, working at the University of Pennsylvania, made silvercoloured films using strands of sulphur nitride.
In 1975, while a visiting professor at Kyoto University, MacDiarmid visited the Tokyo Institute of Technology