Hideki Shirakawa, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Who Developed Conductive Plastics, Passes Away

Professor Emeritus Hideki Shirakawa of the University of Tsukuba, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for successfully developing electricity-conducting plastics, passed away on August 24.

He was 90 years old.

According to NHK and other reports, it was learned on the 3rd that Professor Shirakawa passed away at a hospital in Yokohama last month.

The late professor jointly received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside U.S. doctors Alan Heeger and Alan MacDiarmid for proving that plastics can conduct electricity like metals and for actually inventing conductive polymers (synthetic resins).

His discoveries are currently widely applied in smartphone displays, storage batteries, and more.

Born in Tokyo in 1936, the late professor completed his doctoral coursework at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (currently Institute of Science Tokyo) graduate school in 1966, and served as a professor at the University of Tsukuba and a member of the Council for Science and Technology Policy under the Cabinet Office of Japan.

He is known to have discovered that polyacetylene, a type of plastic, conducts electricity following a failed experiment during his student days at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

(Photo: Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.