Shirakawa, Hideki (1936– )

Japanese chemist who with US physicist Alan J Heeger and US chemist Alan G MacDiarmid shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for the discovery and development of conductive polymers. Plastics that can conduct electricity have many potential commercial applications, such as shields against electromagnetic radiation from computer screens, mobile phone displays, and in the development of light-emitting diodes.

Shirakawa produced a new form of polyacetylene with a silvery appearance when he accidentally added a thousand times the required amount of catalyst in the preparation of a sample of the plastic. He introduced the new form at a meeting of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1975, where he met MacDiarmid who suggested that they should collaborate, together with Heeger, on investigating the conductive properties of the new polymer. Their collaboration resulted in the first chemical doping of polyacetylene with iodine, which produced the world's first conductive plastic.

Shirakawa was born in Tokyo, Japan. He was appointed full professor of chemistry at the Institute of Materials Science of the University of Tsukuba in 1982.