MacDiarmid and Heeger were both on the Penn faculty. This pathbreaking research into 'conducting polymers,' that is, plastics that can conduct electricity, introduced a new and completely unexpected phenomenon to the fields of chemistry and physics and has unleashed a flood of interdisciplinary studies which have continued unabated to this day. Alan MacDiarmid is a truly extraordinary scientist and we offer him and his colleagues our deepest and most heartfelt congratulations. The Nobel Prize honors the trio's 1977 discovery that plastics, or polymers, can be made to conduct electricity much like metals. This finding turned on its head the conventional wisdom that polymers could not conduct electricity, and unleashed a flurry of new research among physicists, chemists, and materials scientists worldwide.
Polymers are molecular chains with a regularly repeating structure.
For a polymer to conduct electric current, it must consist alternately of single and double bonds between the carbon atoms. MacDiarmid, Heeger, and Shirakawa were responsible for the 1977 synthesis and the electrical and chemical doping of polyacetylene, the prototypical conducting polymer, and the rediscovery of polyaniline, now the foremost industrial conducting polymer. MacDiarmid, Heeger, and Shirakawa have subsequently developed conductive polymers into a research field of great importance for chemists as well as physicists. The area has also yielded important practical applications. Research on conductive polymers has also fueled the rapid development of molecular electronics.