Hideki Shirakawa and two others won a Nobel Prize for the discovery and development of conductive polymers. Shirakawa is the ninth Japanese to become a Nobel laureate and the first since Kenzaburo Oe, who won the prize for literature in 1994. He is the second Japanese to receive the chemistry award. The first was the late Ken'ichi Fukui, who won it in 1981.
Most plastics are polymers, substances whose molecules repeat their structure regularly.
They were once believed to be high-quality insulators that, unlike metals, do not conduct electricity. Shirakawa and his colleagues discovered, however, that by changing their molecular structure plastics could be made electrically conductive. At the end of the 1970s, they succeeded in chemically treating a plastic film called polyacetylene and making it conductive. Following this, the field of conductive plastics evolved into an important research field among physicists as well as chemists. Conductive plastics have many advantages over metals.