EVERY school science student learns that plastics don’t conduct electricity,
but the astonishing discovery that some polymers can be made as conductive as
metals has earned three researchers this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “It’s
a very appropriate piece of work to have received a Nobel prize,” says Richard
Friend of Cambridge University, who works with semiconducting plastics. “It had
a huge impact on the chemistry and physics community.”
Chemists Hideki Shirakawa and Alan MacDiarmid and physicist Alan Heeger were
working together in the 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania on polymers that
had a metallic glint. They modified one…
