Chemistry Prize ends Shirakawa's 55-year long quest

Chemistry Prize ends Shirakawa's 55-year long quest
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

TOKYO, Oct 11: Hideki Shirakawa did not know he had become the second Japanese in history to receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry until a journalist called him late on Tuesday night. "I'm honoured, if it's true," the 64-year-old professor emeritus from Tsukuba University near Tokyo said before hanging up. He locked the front door and pulled the blinds, ignoring the pleas of reporters gathering outside.

For him, it was a time not for loud publicity, but for quiet contemplation. After all, the Nobel Prize, awarded for his research on conductivity in plastics, meant Shirakawa was finally at the end of a quest that began more than half a century earlier, in the charred ruins of Tokyo. That was the first time Shirakawa, then an insect-collecting schoolboy, ever laid his hand on plastic, an exotic material brought to Japan by the American Army of occupation. "I want to create a new plastic by getting rid of the disadvantages of ordinary kinds," he wrote a few years later in the yearbook of the junior high school he attended.

"If we can produce it at a lower cost, I wonder how much it would benefit people and society," he added in the optimistic, entrepreneurial spirit of post-war Japan.

Decades were to pass before the boyhood ambitions were translated into reality for the mature researcher. In the 1970s, one of Shirakawa's graduate students onc added too much catalyst by mistake during an experiment. To his surprise, a beautiful silvery film, now known as trans-polyacetylene, appeared on the inside of the reaction vessel.

This was the trigger for Shirakawa's intensified research into plastic as an indispensable material for conducting electricity. But it was not a mainstream topic, which was to prove both an advantage and a disadvantage, Shirakawa told reporters on Wednesday. "As there were no competitors, I had to do it all on my own," he said.

The reward came this week, in the form of the highest honour and cash. He shares the prize with New Zealand-born Alan MacDiarmid, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Alan Heeger, professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The three will also share nine million kronor, or just under a million dollars. "I congratulate him from the bottom of my heart as it is a worldwide recognition of his superior work in chemistry," Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori said in a statement.

Described by his colleagues as patient and egalitarian, Shirakawa also revealed a humble side as he spoke to reporters on Wednesday. "Honestly, I think this is totally extraordinary," said the chemist, who in retirement now has more time for his hobby, birdwatching. "I am very surprised."