Japanese scientist Hideki Shirakawa, co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry, died on August 24 at a hospital in Yokohama, west of Tokyo. He was 90. The University of Tsukuba, where Shirakawa taught and researched after joining in 1979, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause, according to ABC News. Japan's largest newspaper, the Yomiuri, reported the location of his death.
Shirakawa shared the Nobel Prize with American scientists Alan Heeger and Alan MacDiarmid for discovering and developing conductive polymers. Their work demonstrated that plastic could conduct electricity like metal, a finding that defied the common understanding at the time that plastics are not conductive.
The discovery opened the door to inexpensive conductive materials that are lighter and more flexible than metals. Those materials are now used in a range of applications including solar cells and mobile phone screens.
Born in Tokyo in 1936, Shirakawa earned a doctoral degree in engineering at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1966. Ten years later, he became a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked alongside MacDiarmid and Heeger on the research that would eventually earn them the Nobel Prize.
