Overview
- Hideki Shirakawa died on August 24 in a Yokohama hospital at age 90 from metastatic liver tumor and cancer of unknown primary, and his family held a private funeral with his wife Chiyoko as chief mourner.
- As an assistant in 1967 Shirakawa accidentally produced a shiny polyacetylene film that conducted electricity, overturning the view that plastics are always electrical insulators.
- U.S. researchers including Alan MacDiarmid invited Shirakawa to the University of Pennsylvania for postdoctoral work that helped raise the conductivity of the polymer to practical levels by the mid-1970s.
- The discovery paved the way for organic electronics such as OLED displays, flexible solar cells, and components used in modern mobile devices and batteries.
- Shirakawa was an emeritus professor at the University of Tsukuba, won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and received major national honors for changing materials science and electronics.