Shirakawa, Hideki, << shih rah kaw wah, hih deh kee >> (1936-…), a Japanese chemist, won a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize for chemistry. He received this award for the discovery and development of plastic materials in which electric current can flow. Ordinary plastic materials cannot conduct (carry) current. Shirakawa shared the Nobel Prize with two colleagues in this work, the American physicist Alan J. Heeger and the New Zealand-born American chemist Alan G. MacDiarmid. The three scientists conducted the research that led to their Nobel Prize at the University of Pennsylvania. They reported their discovery in a scientific journal in 1977.
Shirakawa and his colleagues won the prize for their work on special polymers, the basic substances of which plastics are made. A polymer is a huge molecule formed by the joining of many smaller molecules into a long chain. The small building units are called monomers. A monomer, in turn, consists of two or more joined atoms. The atoms within a monomer are joined to one another by means of connections known as bonds. Bonds between atoms also join the monomers that make up a polymer.
There are several kinds of bonds. Shirakawa and his colleagues developed conducting polymers by manipulating covalent bonds. A covalent bond consists of a pair of electrons that are shared by two atoms. An ordinary electric current consists of a flow of electrons; the manipulation of the bonds freed a small number of electrons from bonds so that these electrons could flow.
A number of products use conductive polymers, and others are being developed. Major applications include antistatic materials for photographic film; solar cells, which use sunlight to generate electric power; and displays in mobile telephones and television sets.
Shirakawa was born in Tokyo. In 1966, he received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He taught there from 1966 to 1979. Shirakawa became an associate professor at the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Tsukuba in 1979. He was a professor there from 1982 to early 2000.
