The University of Pennsylvania chemistry building on 34th Street, late November 1976. In a small fume cupboard on the second floor, a 49-year-old New Zealander with a Lower Hutt accent and a Cambridge PhD was watching a Japanese visitor manipulate a thin black film with a pair of tweezers. The film was polyacetylene—a plastic, in essence, although a strange one, made by polymerising acetylene gas over a Ziegler-Natta catalyst. Its inventor, Hideki Shirakawa, was the visitor with the tweezers. He had been in Philadelphia since September on a six-month fellowship paid for by the United States Office of Naval Research at $21,650, an amount the New Zealander had personally hustled out of a programme manager called Ken Wynne. The black film was being exposed to iodine vapour. After a few minutes the iodine would be flushed out and the film carried, still on its glass slide, across the road to the laboratory of a third man, the American physicist Alan Heeger, where a graduate student named C.K. Chiang would clip electrodes to its corners and pass a current through it.
The number on the dial, when it stopped jumping, was around a thousand siemens per centimetre. That is roughly the conductivity of metallic mercury. The plastic film, undoped, had been a semiconductor about as conductive as silicon. Doped, it was a metal. The conductivity had risen by a factor of about ten million. According to the National Academy of Sciences memoir of his life, the New Zealander watching this said almost nothing while it happened. He waited until the readings were repeated. Then he and Shirakawa walked back across the road to write up the experiment. The seminal paper was received by the Journal of the Chemical Society, Chemical Communications on 16 May 1977. It is one of the foundational documents of the field of conducting polymers and the reason a Nobel Prize was eventually shared, twenty-three years later, between the New Zealander, the Japanese chemist and the American physicist who measured the films.
The New Zealander was Alan Graham MacDiarmid. He was born in Masterton in 1927 to a part-Scottish engineer who would shortly be unemployed for four years; he left high school at sixteen because his father’s pension would not stretch to a fourth year of secondary education; he washed glassware at Victoria University College in Wellington for the better part of a decade before he became one of its lecturers’ demonstrators; and by the time he died in February 2007, fallen down the stairs of his house in suburban Philadelphia on the day he was due to fly home to New Zealand to give a lecture, he had published more than 600 scientific papers, held the Order of New Zealand, lent his name to a research institute headquartered at Victoria University and to similar institutes in China, India, Brazil and South Korea, and made it possible to put a colour screen on a mobile phone.
He is, with Ernest Rutherford and Maurice Wilkins, one of three New Zealanders to have shared a Nobel Prize for science. The other two left the country young and never really came home. MacDiarmid did, in his way, although he could not stop working long enough to die there.
Masterton, the Depression, and a barefoot walk to school
Alan was born on 14 April 1927 in Masterton, then a Wairarapa town of about eight thousand people. His father Archibald was an engineer; his mother Ruby ran a household of five children, of whom Alan was the second-youngest. There were two older brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister. The Depression hit shortly after Alan started school. Archibald was unemployed for four years. The family moved to Lower Hutt, where he eventually found work with a petroleum company. They rented; they had no telephone and no refrigerator; Alan delivered milk and the local newspaper for pocket money; and like most of the children in the schools he attended, he walked to class in bare feet. He noted in his Nobel autobiography that the soles of those children’s feet became, with practice, more or less leather.
The household was poor, but it was the kind of household in which the family hold-back rule applied at the dinner table. The acronym was FHB. If there were guests, the children took less so the visitors could take more. He talked about it often in later life. He believed it was the most important moral lesson of his upbringing. The MacDiarmids were Wesleyans; they were also, in the New Zealand way of the period, hospitable to a fault. According to the same autobiography one of the family stories, possibly burnished, was that Ernest Rutherford, who had spent his childhood near the Pelorus Sound and his career in Cambridge, knew Alan’s father slightly and had occasionally called in. Whether the visits actually happened or not, the only other New Zealander to win a Nobel for chemistry was a presence in the Lower Hutt house even before Alan had heard his own name said in connection with one.
The chemistry started, as he always told the story, at the age of ten. He found one of his father’s old chemistry textbooks, dated to the late 1800s; he found, at the local library, a 1924 American book called The Boy Chemist by A. Frederick Collins, which he later said would now have a more inclusive title; he checked the latter out repeatedly and worked through almost every experiment in it inside a year. He kept his apparatus in the bottom of a bookcase. He preferred experiments that produced colours. On Guy Fawkes Night he set off homemade fireworks. His older sister Alice, who lived to see the Nobel Prize, remembered him by the smell of sulphur.
He attended Hutt Valley High School from 1940. By his sixteenth birthday his father had retired on a small pension, and there was no longer enough money in the house to keep him in school. He left at the end of his third year. In 1943, while the war was still on, he took a job in the chemistry department at Victoria University College, the Wellington outpost of the University of New Zealand. The department had two academics, A. D. “Bobbie” Monro and a junior colleague, and around twelve hundred students. Alan was the lab boy.
Lab boy to demonstrator, by way of orange crystals
Lab boy meant, in 1943, exactly what it sounded like. He cleaned glassware. He swept floors. He prepared demonstration samples for Monro’s lectures. He also enrolled, in his own time and at his own expense, for a part-time BSc in chemistry. He passed the first of his examinations in 1944 and never afterwards stopped earning degrees. He paid for his own studies. He noted later, with quiet pride, that he had supported himself financially from the age of seventeen.
Sometime in the late 1940s, mixing reagents for one of Monro’s lectures, he prepared a quantity of tetrasulfur tetranitride. The chemical formula is S4N4. It crystallises out of solution as small bright orange octahedra that look, in the right light, like flakes of saffron. He was captivated by them. Three decades later he would say that colour had been one of the engines of his career; the orange of S4N4, the silver of polyacetylene, the green of doped polyaniline, the blue of its undoped form. Each colour was a clue to electronic structure. He liked, he said, pretty things.
His MSc thesis at Victoria, on the chemistry of S4N4 and its decomposition products, became his first published paper. It appeared in Nature in 1949. He was twenty-two; he had still not, at that point, sat in a doctoral seminar; the southern hemisphere had no PhD programmes. He won a Fulbright Fellowship in 1950, one of the first cohort, and was steered by the United States consul in Wellington towards the University of Wisconsin–Madison for its inorganic chemistry. He had expected to stay two semesters. He stayed three years, was made a Knapp Fellow, and ended up in a rent-free room in a wood-shingled mansion on the shores of Lake Mendota that had once belonged to a Wisconsin governor.
Wisconsin, Cambridge, Marian
He was president of the Madison International Club. At one of the club’s dances, in 1951, he met Marian Mathieu, an American mathematics graduate of about his age. He always afterwards described it as the most important chance meeting of his life. They were privately engaged in 1952. She was the daughter of a French-Canadian family; her vowels were not his vowels and the courtship was carried by long letters. He completed a PhD at Wisconsin in 1953 under Norris Hall, working on the kinetics of carbon-14 and nitrogen-15-labelled cyanide complexes of transition metals. He was unwilling to let go of his ambition to spend a year in Britain, and on a friend’s tip he applied for a New Zealand Shell graduate scholarship and got it. He went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in late 1953, to work with Harry Emeléus on silicon hydrides.
Marian followed him. They were married in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College on 10 July 1954. He completed his second PhD, on the chemistry of new derivatives of the silyl radical, in 1955. He was twenty-eight; he held two doctorates from two of the best inorganic chemistry departments in the world; he had a wife. He still had no money. The University of St Andrews offered him a junior position in Scotland; he took it for six months. The University of Pennsylvania then offered him an instructorship in chemistry. He took that.
He arrived at Penn in 1955. He stayed forty-five years. He worked, for the first twenty of them, on silicon hydrides, which the United States Air Force was funding because they were of interest as potential rocket fuels, and on derivatives of the orange S4N4 that had captivated him in Wellington, which the United States Navy was funding because nobody much knew what they would be useful for and the Navy thought it should find out. He published more than ninety papers across those two areas in those two decades; he was promoted from instructor to assistant professor to associate professor to full professor; he was, by the early 1970s, a respected and slightly under-noticed inorganic chemist whose lab was in the same building as one of the most ambitious materials-physics groups in the United States. He and Marian had four children: Heather, Dawn, Duncan and Gail. They lived in Drexel Hill, a leafy suburb west of Philadelphia. Marian ran the household. Alan ran the laboratory.
A polymer made of sulphur and nitrogen
The materials physics group across the corridor was led by Alan Heeger, a Sioux City-born physicist who had come to Penn in 1962 and built one of the first university materials laboratories in the United States to be funded under the post-Sputnik defence research push. Heeger and MacDiarmid were polite collaborators rather than close friends. Their offices were near each other; their backgrounds were very different; their shared interest, by the early 1970s, was electrical conduction in unusual materials.
In 1973 Heeger walked into MacDiarmid’s office and mentioned a paper by Mortimer Labes at nearby Temple University. Labes had reported that polysulfur nitride, written (SN)x, conducted electricity. MacDiarmid initially misheard him; he thought Heeger had said tin (Sn)x, a metal, and remarked drily that of course tin conducted, it was a metal. When the misunderstanding was sorted out, MacDiarmid realised that he had spent much of the previous twenty years preparing the precursor S4N4 in his Penn laboratory. He could make (SN)x; nobody else really could; and Labes’ result, if reproducible, was strange. (SN)x contained no metal atoms at all. It was sulphur and nitrogen in a long chain. It was, in the language of the day, an organic polymer that conducted like a metal. By 1975 MacDiarmid and his postdoc Anthony Garito had grown beautiful golden crystals of (SN)x by carefully subliming the explosive intermediate S2N2 and letting it polymerise in the solid state. Brominated, the crystals were black and conducted at 38,000 siemens per centimetre. Cooled below 0.26 kelvin, they were superconductors.
This was, in any other man’s career, the discovery. MacDiarmid was forty-eight years old, well established, comfortably tenured, and had finally found his way into a really interesting problem. The (SN)x work would on its own have built a respectable late career. What happened next, in the autumn of 1975, was that the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science invited him to Kyoto as a visiting professor, and somebody at the Tokyo Institute of Technology asked him to come up to Tokyo and give a lecture on the golden crystals.
A green tea in Tokyo, and a thousandfold accident
The lecture happened. MacDiarmid passed a sample of his shiny golden (SN)x crystals around the room. Among the audience members who came up to talk to him afterwards was a young Japanese chemist who had not, in fact, attended the lecture. His name was Hideki Shirakawa. They sat down over green tea. The exchange MacDiarmid recorded in his Nobel autobiography is short and entirely characteristic. He said they met over a cup of green tea after his lecture. As he showed Shirakawa his golden crystals, Shirakawa pulled out a small piece of silvery film and put it on the table.
The film was polyacetylene. Polyacetylene was, in 1975, a black powder, the kind of thing that fell out of the bottom of a Ziegler-Natta polymerisation flask and got swept into a tray. The polymer that Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta had won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for figuring out how to make commercially—polyethylene and polypropylene, the basis of half the plastic in a New Zealand kitchen—came out of the same family of catalysts. When you tried to polymerise acetylene gas with one, you got a black insoluble mess. You did not get a film. You did not get something that looked like aluminium foil. Yet here, on a Tokyo Institute of Technology laboratory bench, was a piece of polymer that gleamed like silver.
Shirakawa told MacDiarmid the story he had been telling for almost a decade. Sometime around 1967 a graduate student in his laboratory—in some accounts a visiting scientist from elsewhere in Japan—had been asked to make polyacetylene. The student had misread the catalyst preparation note. Where the recipe asked for a millimolar concentration of titanium tetrabutoxide and triethyl aluminium, the student had read molar; he had used a thousand times too much. When acetylene gas was bubbled into the resulting solution, the polymerisation happened so fast that the polymer formed as a film on the wetted surfaces of the flask, instead of falling out as a powder. The film looked, depending on which face was uppermost, like aluminium leaf or like a pale pink jelly. Shirakawa had spent the years since trying to understand why. He had measured its conductivity. It was about 10-5 siemens per centimetre, comparable to silicon, which is to say that the silver-coloured plastic film was not really conducting at all. It was a semiconductor.
MacDiarmid asked, on the spot, whether Shirakawa would be willing to come to Penn. He thought the doping trick that had turned (SN)x from a semiconductor into a metal might do something similar to polyacetylene. Shirakawa said yes. MacDiarmid spent the next few months hunting for the money, which he eventually got from Ken Wynne at the Office of Naval Research. Shirakawa arrived in Philadelphia in September 1976.
What conducting polymer means, in plain English
It is worth pausing, before getting to the doping experiment itself, to explain what is strange about a plastic that conducts electricity. A plastic is, by ordinary intuition, an insulator. Wires are wrapped in plastic precisely because the plastic stops the current escaping. A copper wire conducts because its outer electrons are not really attached to any particular copper atom; they form a sea of mobile charge throughout the metal. A plastic, by contrast, is held together by covalent bonds in which each electron sits, more or less, between a fixed pair of atoms. Push on those electrons and they have nowhere to go.
Polyacetylene is unusual because its backbone is a long chain of carbon atoms joined by alternating single and double bonds: single, double, single, double, all the way along. Chemists call this a conjugated chain. The double bonds carry an extra pair of electrons in what is called a pi orbital, and because the orbitals lie above and below the plane of the chain they can overlap from one carbon to the next. In principle, an electron in one of these pi orbitals is not stuck between two carbons. It can run, like a marble in a long groove, the length of the polymer.
That alone, however, would not give you a metal. The pi-electron groove in pure polyacetylene has a small energy gap in it, of the kind a semiconductor has. The electrons want to settle into a low-energy state in which the chain alternates rather than averages, and to push current through it you have to push them across the gap. Doping is the trick. When MacDiarmid and Shirakawa exposed the silvery film to iodine vapour, the iodine molecules pulled electrons out of the chain. Each removed electron left behind a hole—a place where an electron had been—and the hole could move along the conjugated backbone like a bubble travelling under cling film, with neighbouring electrons hopping in to fill it and creating new holes behind them. Add enough iodine and you get not just a few hopping holes but a continuous band of mobile charge. The plastic now conducts. The conductivity of doped polyacetylene measured at Penn that November was, in the end, several times higher than that of mercury. It is still less than copper, but it is a thousand miles from anything plastic was supposed to be.
Why this matters in 2026 is the part of the story most New Zealanders see and don’t realise they are seeing. The light-emitting diodes inside the screen of the phone you are probably reading this on are organic; the layers between the electrodes are conjugated polymers descended from polyacetylene. The anti-static layer on photographic film, while photographic film still existed, was a conjugated polymer. The conducting layer in the touchscreen of an early Kindle was a derivative of polyaniline, which MacDiarmid largely worked out himself in the 1980s. Flexible solar cells, organic transistors, smart windows that change colour with a current, polymer batteries: every one of those technologies starts at the experiment that finished, around eight in the evening, in a Penn fume cupboard in late November 1976. None of them would exist in their current form without the plastic that did not, until that night, behave like plastic.
The doping that made the metal
The first thing they tried at Penn was bromine, which had worked on the (SN)x golden crystals. Bromine on polyacetylene worked, briefly, and then ate the polymer; the bromine atoms started adding across the double bonds within hours, breaking up the conjugation that was the whole point. They switched to iodine. Iodine is the next halogen down the periodic table; it is a milder oxidiser; it pulls an electron off the chain without inserting itself permanently into the structure. The first iodine-doped films were carried, on their slides, across the road to Heeger’s lab. C.K. Chiang made the four-probe measurement. The reading was around a thousand siemens per centimetre. They repeated it. It was real.
The paper was written quickly. Synthesis of electrically conducting organic polymers: halogen derivatives of polyacetylene, (CH)x, by Shirakawa, Louis, MacDiarmid, Chiang and Heeger, was sent to Chemical Communications in May 1977 and published in issue sixteen. A more detailed paper followed within months in Physical Review Letters. The community took a year or two to be convinced; for several years afterwards the wider chemistry establishment was politely sceptical. By 1980 the doubts had gone. Polyacetylene was not, as it turned out, the polymer that was going to find its way into useful technology—the doped material was unstable in air, and it never made it into a battery or a screen—but it was the polymer that had broken the rule. Once it had been broken, the world was full of other polymers that would do similar tricks more usefully.
MacDiarmid took the next decade to work out polyaniline. Aniline, an oily aromatic amine, is one of the most produced industrial chemicals in the world; almost every blue, green and black dye in a clothing factory derives from it. Polymerised, it makes a long conjugated chain that comes in three oxidation states—leucoemeraldine, emeraldine and pernigraniline—named, with a chemist’s eye for colour, after the white, green and dark-green stages of the polymerisation. After the iodine-on-polyacetylene moment, MacDiarmid showed in a series of papers between 1985 and 1987 that polyaniline could be made to conduct by exposing the emeraldine form to almost any strong acid. Polyaniline was stable in air. It was processable. It is, two generations of conducting polymers later, still in use.
Marian, and the long single decade
Marian Mathieu MacDiarmid died in 1990. They had been married for thirty-six years. The cause is recorded in passing in the Royal Society memoir of her husband as untimely; the family did not, in 1990 or afterwards, talk publicly about it in any detail. Alan was sixty-three. Their four children were grown and scattered. Heather, the eldest, was in Pennsylvania; Dawn was in Texas; Duncan was working in industry; Gail was a young mother. He took on more public roles, more lectures, more travelling commitments. He spoke about Marian rarely but always with a quiet completeness that suggested he had not, in any practical sense, finished the conversation.
He stayed in the house in Drexel Hill. He bought a small cabin in the Poconos a couple of hours’ drive north of Philadelphia. Each summer he invited his entire research group up there for a weekend on the lake. He drove the boat himself; he taught the students to water-ski; he set himself up as an avuncular host who happened to be one of the most cited chemists in the world. According to the National Academy of Sciences memoir, the Pocono trips were a fixture of the group’s calendar for almost twenty years. He was, in the manner of an older generation of academic, completely uninterested in keeping the laboratory and the home life separate. He answered student emails on Christmas afternoon. He made a habit, at conferences, of going to the poster sessions and asking questions of the youngest people in the room. His favourite saying, repeated often enough that several of his obituarists called it his motto, was that science is people. He did not mean it as a slogan. He meant it as a working principle.
Sometime in the 1990s he met Gayl Gentile, an art teacher who lived locally. They became partners through the decade. They eventually married in Philadelphia on 5 June 2005, when Alan was seventy-eight and ill. She survived him by seven years. He had no further children. He kept, on the wall of his Penn office, a sign he had been carrying around since the 1970s. It read: I am a very lucky person, and the harder I work, the luckier I seem to be.
A telephone call from Stockholm
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences telephoned him at home in the early hours of 10 October 2000. The Nobel Committee citation read, for the discovery and development of conductive polymers. The prize was shared three ways: MacDiarmid, Heeger and Shirakawa. Heeger had moved to the University of California Santa Barbara in 1982; he and MacDiarmid had not collaborated closely for almost twenty years, and the years between had been, in a small way, awkward. The three men flew to Stockholm in early December. They gave their Nobel lectures on 8 December at Aula Magna. MacDiarmid’s was titled Synthetic metals—a novel role for organic polymers. He spoke for forty-five minutes. He used about a hundred slides. He named, by the count of one of his former students who attended, every doctoral student and postdoc who had passed through his Penn laboratory in the previous twenty-five years.
His mother had been dead for thirty years; his father longer. The brother he was closest to, Roderick, watched the ceremony on television in Tauranga. Alan rang him afterwards from the hotel. According to the family, the first thing he said about the prize itself was that they had been right about the colour. Orange crystals to silver film to green polyaniline; the chemistry had been, all along, written in colour.
The Royal Society of New Zealand awarded him the Rutherford Medal a few weeks later. The 2002 New Year Honours, dated at Wellington on 31 December 2001, appointed him to the Order of New Zealand, a body of twenty living members modelled on the British Order of Merit and the highest civilian honour the country awards. He came home for the investiture and gave a public lecture at Victoria University. The room was packed. He told the story of the orange crystals in the Wellington lab, and the silver film in Tokyo, and the iodine in Philadelphia, and a great many people in the room had not realised that one of the most cited chemists alive had, fifty years earlier, been mopping the floor of a building they had walked past on their way to work.
The MacDiarmid Institute
The most consequential thing he did with the Nobel was, by his own later account, lend his name to the institute. The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology was constituted on 1 July 2002 as one of the original New Zealand Centres of Research Excellence, headquartered at Victoria University in Wellington. It was a deliberate consortium: Victoria, the University of Canterbury, the University of Otago, Massey University, GNS Science and the old Industrial Research Limited at Gracefield. It is still going. It now also draws in the University of Auckland and AUT, runs more than a hundred postgraduate scholarships at any time, and is one of the principal reasons New Zealand has a working materials-physics community at all.
Alan’s actual role in the institute was that of patron, mentor and recruiter. He visited from Drexel Hill three or four times a year. He gave lectures to groups of New Zealand graduate students who could not believe how much time he had for them. He wrote letters of reference; he tipped the names of bright Wellingtonians to American departments; he sat through institute strategy meetings in Te Aro and made gentle, well-aimed comments. He was, his New Zealand colleagues recalled, almost embarrassed to be the institute’s namesake while still alive—he kept introducing himself by saying that the building was being named after him because they could not bury him in it yet. He was funny in a quiet way. He was a hard man not to like.
The institute’s deep impact on the country, harder to summarise, is that it was the first sustained investment of post-Lange-Bolger central government money in materials science in New Zealand. Before it, individual physicists and chemists in Auckland and Christchurch had run small groups largely on departmental scraps. After it, there was a national fellowship pipeline; there was a culture of cross-university collaboration on nanotechnology; there was a place where a New Zealand graduate could do a PhD on conducting polymers without leaving the country. The country still trains, by the standards of Anglosphere physics, an extremely small number of materials scientists. It trains a great many more than it would otherwise have done.
He carried with him, in those last visits, two fountain pens. One was filled with green ink. The other was filled with blue. The ink was nano-scale polyaniline in its emeraldine and leucoemeraldine forms. He showed them to anyone who asked. The pens worked. He loved that the pens worked. The chemistry, all the way down, was still about colour.
A fall on the stairs at Drexel Hill
By late 2006 he had been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a slowly progressing failure of the bone marrow that turns, often, into acute leukaemia. His haematologist gave him a few months. He had been booked, before the diagnosis, to fly to New Zealand for the third Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology Conference of the institute that bore his name; the conference was being held in Wellington in February 2007. He decided to go. Gayl was to travel with him. He spent the first week of February packing.
On the morning of Wednesday 7 February 2007, in the house in Drexel Hill, he fell down a flight of stairs. He died at the bottom of them. He was 79. His suitcase was packed. He had been due to leave for Philadelphia airport that afternoon. Gayl found him. The local press in Pennsylvania reported the death the next morning; Chemical and Engineering News, the trade paper of his profession, ran an obituary the same week. The MacDiarmid Institute conference went ahead in Wellington. They held a minute’s silence at the opening session and his colleague Andrew Holmes, who had flown out from Cambridge to give a plenary lecture, rewrote it overnight as a memorial. The lecture finished, according to people in the room, with most of the audience in tears.
He is buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, west of Philadelphia, beside Marian. The Penn chemistry department named a lecture series for him; the University of Texas at Dallas, where he had taken a part-time appointment in 2002, named its NanoTech Institute for him posthumously; Lower Hutt named a small road MacDiarmid Place in 2013. The painting Marianne Muggeridge made of him in 2002 hangs in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery on Customhouse Quay in Wellington. He looks, in the painting, exactly like a Lower Hutt schoolboy who has just been told he was right about the chemistry.
What he means
It is, in the end, a small story about an unlikely material. Plastics conduct electricity. They conduct it because a chemist in Tokyo had a student who used a thousand times too much catalyst, and a chemist in Wellington spent four years washing glassware before he was allowed to do an experiment, and a chemist in Lower Hutt looked at the silver film and the orange crystals and recognised that they were both about colour, and a physicist across the road had an iodine bottle. The Nobel Committee in 2000 said, in its citation, that the discovery showed plastic could behave like metal, given the right encouragement. That is true. It is also true that the discovery was the work of three men in three countries, of whom one was a Wairarapa boy who had walked to school in bare feet and never quite stopped being grateful for it.
What he leaves New Zealand is the institute. It is, in its quiet way, the most useful thing any of our Nobel laureates has done for the country directly. Rutherford lent his name to a small foundation. Wilkins gave a few lectures. MacDiarmid built, while he was still alive, a piece of national scientific architecture. The MacDiarmid Institute’s graduate students now publish, on average, a couple of hundred papers a year in materials science. Some of them get jobs at home. More of them get jobs offshore and come back later. The pipeline is, in a country whose research funding is famously thin, a real and replicable thing.
What he leaves the rest of us is the chemistry, embedded in the things we look at all day. The screens in our pockets contain his polymers. The capacitors in our cars contain his polymers. The coatings on our anti-static carpets and our solar cells and our flexible electronics all descend, by paper trail, from the November night in 1976 when a Japanese chemist, an American physicist and a Lower Hutt boy in his late forties watched a needle on a meter jump into a region it should not have been able to reach, and recognised that an old assumption—plastic does not conduct—had quietly stopped being true.
The bare feet are part of it. The barefoot walk to school in Lower Hutt; the Depression household pressing food on guests; the lab boy job at sixteen; the colour-loving experimentalist who would, fifty years later, carry a green fountain pen full of polyaniline ink because he could not stop showing people what the chemistry could do. He was, in the proper New Zealand sense of the phrase, a careful and unshowy man. He liked pretty things. He thought science was people. He wrote, on a sign on his office wall, that the harder he worked the luckier he seemed to be. The sign was right.
Sources and further reading
- Alan G. MacDiarmid — Biographical, NobelPrize.org. His own autobiographical sketch, written in late 2000, with the Family Hold Back rule, the bookcase, the bare feet and the chance Madison meeting with Marian.
- Alan G. MacDiarmid, Nobel Lecture, 8 December 2000. The full forty-five-minute lecture in PDF.
- Hideki Shirakawa — Biographical, NobelPrize.org. The thousandfold-too-much-catalyst story in Shirakawa’s own words.
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000 — Popular information. A clear lay-reader explanation of conjugated bonds, polarons and the doping mechanism.
- Richard B. Kaner and Andrew B. Holmes, “Alan G. MacDiarmid 1927–2007”, National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs, 2024. The detailed scientific biography, with the Pocono cabin, the science-is-people slogan, the fountain pens, and the Royal Society source memoir on which it draws.
- Andrew B. Holmes, Michael L. Klein and R. H. Baughman, “Alan Graham MacDiarmid 14 April 1927–7 February 2007”, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 2023. The full Royal Society memoir.
- The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, Wellington. The institute he lent his name to, still operating from Victoria University.
- NZEdge profile of Alan MacDiarmid. A New Zealand-side biographical sketch with several of his most-quoted lines.
- Science Learning Hub timeline, Alan MacDiarmid. A schools-level summary of the major dates.
- Wikipedia — Alan MacDiarmid.
- Wikipedia — MacDiarmid Institute.
- Britannica — Alan G. MacDiarmid.
- Mark Everton, dir., Super Plastics Man — The Alan MacDiarmid Story, 2007 (42 minutes), MacDiarmid Institute. The closest thing to a filmed biography, made shortly after his death.
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