By ANNE BESTON and AGENCIES
The work which earned New Zealand-born scientist Alan MacDiarmid the Nobel Prize for chemistry has paved the way for a revolution in the way we live.
Professor MacDiarmid, aged 73, was awarded the $NZ2.3 million prize jointly with two other researchers, one an American and the other
Japanese, for discovering that plastics can conduct electricity.
The trio's ground-breaking work has led to an entirely new field of scientific endeavour and will probably mean the computer silicon chip is eventually replaced by plastics that would increase the capacity of the modern-day PC 60,000 times.
Auckland University Dean of Chemistry Professor Ralph Cooney said the prize was "absolutely stunning" for New Zealand science.
"What's really special is that this guy has remained really involved with New Zealand, his connections here are much stronger than New Zealand's previous Nobel winners."
Professor MacDiarmid was in New Zealand to receive an honorary doctorate from Victoria University last year and attended a conference in his honour in Auckland this year.
His discovery in the 1970s that plastic used in everyday life, such as rubbish bags, can be modified to conduct electricity could eventually make computers so small they could be inserted into the human body to tell us when we are sick or improve our memory.
Molecular electronics could also produce rechargeable batteries and weather sensors to protect crops.
Professor MacDiarmid was born in Masterton in 1927, but the family moved to Wellington four years later. He attended Hutt Valley High School and gained his bachelor and masters of science degrees at Victoria University of Wellington.
He was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1950, which he used to gain a PhD from Wisconsin University. He gained a second PhD from Cambridge University and became a junior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 where he has remained.
His sister, Alice Palmer of Milford, describes her "science-mad" brother as a charming man who, although bright, worked hard. He rang his family in New Zealand, Mrs Palmer and three brothers, at 3 am to break the news.
Mrs Palmer remembers him as a young man delivering milk during cold Wellington winters to earn enough money to buy chemicals for home experiments.
The professor said his award had proved that the new frontiers of science will cross the usual borders between science and engineering.
"This award is a wonderful recognition of the importance of inter-disciplinary research. We had chemists, physicists, electrochemists and electronic engineers all working together on the same problem."
He was not expecting to win the Nobel Prize. "At the time we were fascinated by the science. We lived it, we breathed it, we slept it. It was complete immersion. Then, just as if one goes to Las Vegas or Atlantic City and if you are brave enough to put a quarter in the slot machine, the vague thought goes through one's mind that maybe you might hit the jackpot."
Professor MacDiarmid, who became an American citizen in 1966, becomes just the fourth New Zealand-born winner of the Nobel Prize following Lord Ernest Rutherford's for chemistry in 1908, Maurice Wilkins' for medicine in 1962 and John Eccles' for medicine in 1963.
This year's six winners of the Nobel Prize were scientists who had developed products that changed everyday life in the largest cities and the most remote towns.
Among the six winners were three physicists who helped bring about the information revolution with ever-smaller and faster personal computers, pocket calculators, cellphones and CD players.
Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in 1958, a move that helped spark the information age. Herbert Kroemer of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of St Petersburg, Russia contriubted to satellite and cellphone technology.
The prizes awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences are each worth $US 915,000 ($NZ2.3 million).
The chemistry prize will be split three ways.
The Nobel prizes, first awarded in 1901, are the pinnacle of achievement in the sciences.
They were created by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel - the inventor of dynamite - who died in 1896.
By ANNE BESTON and AGENCIES
The work which earned New Zealand-born scientist Alan MacDiarmid the Nobel Prize for chemistry has paved the way for a revolution in the way we live.
Professor MacDiarmid, aged 73, was awarded the $NZ2.3 million prize jointly with two other researchers, one an American and the other
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