Hideki Shirakawa, who developed a plastic that conducts electricity and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, dies at the age of 90

Hideki Shirakawa, a professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for developing a plastic that conducts electricity, died on August 24th at a hospital in Yokohama due to metastatic liver tumor and cancer of unknown primary origin. He was 90 years old. Born in Tokyo. The funeral was attended by close relatives. The chief mourner was Chiyoko Tsuma.

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Graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology (now Tokyo University of Science) Faculty of Science and Engineering in 1961. After working as an assistant at the same university, he became a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, an assistant professor at the University of Tsukuba in 1979, a professor at the same university in 1982, and retired in 2000.

It has been thought that polymers such as plastics do not conduct electricity. When Shirakawa was a research assistant at Tokyo Institute of Technology, a research student failed to synthesize polyacetylene, and his attention was drawn to a thin film that was created by chance. After detailed analysis, they created a thin film with a gloss similar to aluminum foil.

Initially, he did not attract much attention, but while studying in the United States, he succeeded in developing a polyacetylene thin film that conducts electricity with researchers who would later jointly win the Nobel Prize. It was released in 1977 and received high praise.

Shirakawa's polyacetylene thin film attracted attention as an electrode material during the development stage of lithium-ion batteries, which led to the explosive spread of mobile devices such as cell phones. Conductive polymers such as polyacetylene are widely used in IT devices such as touch panels.