KEY POINTS:
There is no doubt that Alan MacDiarmid, who died this week in Philadelphia, was one of the great New Zealanders of the 20th century. His achievements rank with those of Sir Ernest Rutherford and Sir Edmund Hillary, even though his was never a household name like theirs.
When
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2000, few outside his immediate circles had heard of him in his own country.
In a sense this was perfectly understandable. After graduating in Wellington, he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship and never returned to live. Instead he pursued a glittering academic career in Britain and America.
But this cannot fully explain his comparative lack of recognition at home; Rutherford similarly travelled overseas after graduation to do great things.
A better explanation lies in the apparent obscurity of his work. His citation for the Nobel Prize, which he shared with two others, says "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers". To ordinary people this is much harder to grasp than such clear statements as Hillary being the first man to climb Everest or Rutherford being in charge of the laboratory where the atom was first split.
Yet it would be an enormous mistake to underestimate MacDiarmid's legacy because of a little jargon. In plain terms, he developed a type of plastic that can conduct electricity, leading to revolutionary changes in the technology of videos and mobile phones.
Obviously this is having a profound effect on our lives and a colleague at the University of Texas at Dallas, physics professor Da Hsuan Feng, compared MacDiarmid with his great predecessor: "Rutherford discovered radioactivity that changed the world in the 20th century, and Alan MacDiarmid discovered conducting polymers that will change the economy of the 21st century."
That is high praise indeed, but MacDiarmid shared another great quality with his more famous countrymen. Like them, he put back so much more than he ever took.
Just as Rutherford mentored a whole generation of scientists at Cambridge and Hillary did so much for the people of Nepal, MacDiarmid was tireless in his efforts to help and guide young students.
Throughout his career he emphasised the importance of encouraging them and he continued to teach first-year students even though his illustrious reputation might have relieved him of the onerous burden. The measure of the man, therefore, was as much his great heartedness as it was his great achievements.
