Alan MacDiarmid
Alan MacDiarmid FRS, Nobel Laureate
Member of the International Advisory Board
MacDiarmid Institute
1927-2007
Alan MacDiarmid died on 7/02/07 after a fall in his home in Philadelphia. He was about to leave his house to head for the airport to attend the AMN-3 conference in New Zealand.
A memorial for Alan was held 16 March 2007 at the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul.
SuperPlasticsMan: The Alan MacDiarmid Story
The MacDiarmid institute is pleased to make available this documentary celebrating the life and work of Professor Alan MacDiarmid.
Tribute to Alan
by Paul Callaghan
Alan was a proud New Zealander. He was born in Masterton New Zealand on 14 April 1927. He attended school in the Hutt Valley near Wellington and took a Masters degree in Chemistry at Victoria University of Wellington. From there he travelled on a Fullbright Scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, where he took the first of his PhD degrees. The second he obtained from the University of Cambridge. Much of his professional life was spent at the University of Pennsylvania, and more recently also at the University of Texas, Dallas. Alan was strongly connected to his New Zealand family, he had scientific collaborations in New Zealand and he was a member of the International Advisory Board of the MacDiarmid Institute. We in the MacDiarmid Institute honour Alan as part of our heritage, and our pride.
A great deal about Alan can be found on the Kiwi heroes website. Alan's interest in chemistry began when he was ten years old with an old chemistry text book belonging to his father. He found it mysterious, but spent hours poring over the pages with burning curiosity! His enlightenment came when he discovered in the children's section of the Lower Hutt public library, a book with a bright blue cover called, "The Boy Chemist", such improbable titles being a feature of books in the 1930s. Alan carried out most of the experiments it described. Chemistry had hooked him for life. It led him to work as a lab boy for "Bobbie" Monro, the lecturer in first-year chemistry at Victoria University, for whom he first prepared the beautiful bright orange crystals of Sulphur Nitride, later the subject of his masters thesis, and his first scientific publication in 1949. Color in chemistry was to be a driving force in Alan's career.
Many years later, at the University of Pennsylvania, prompted by his friend and colleague Alan Heeger, he returned to Sulphur Nitride, this time making long chain polymers, again, as golden crystals. This non-metallic material, remarkably, conducted electricity, and could be made more conducting by doping with bromine. In 1975, while visiting Hideki Shirakawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Alan learned of one of the famous accidents of science, that Shirakawa's student in polymerising acetylenehad used, by mistake, 1000 times too much catalyst - the result being a silvery-pinkish jelly. Colour was the clue to Alan-that this might be a conducting polymer. He invited Hideki Shirakawa to Pennsylvania, where together they used the method of Bromine doping to discover that they could increase the conductivity of the silvery polyacetylene by over a million. The rest, as they say, is history. This discovery was miles ahead of its time. It laid the foundation for today's cutting-edge display technology and next-generation radio-frequency identification tags. It is science that will truly revolutionise future technologies.
Of course, this is just the most famous of Alan's scientific achievements, the one that earned him the Nobel prize for Chemistry in 2000. And yet it was just one of a lifetime of research achievements. Alan had the great scientist's instinct, he knew his craft, but most importantly he understood its context. Alan saw science as one of the greatest of human endeavours, carried out by people working in partnership. Alan was, at heart, cooperative. He listened carefully, and thought with profound lucidity. He spoke deliberately, in pure prose. He communicated with clarity and style, simplifying the seemingly complex, sharing science insights with wit and humanity. He urged us to think about the great problems facing the world, most recently the need for alternative energy sources.
When Alan toured New Zealand in 2001 he spoke to packed audiences, always finishing with the story of the great white bird of truth. That story was Alan's metaphor for science, for its courage, its tenacity and its veracity, for the way we need to help each other, standing on the shoulders of those who go before.
Alan was our friend and our inspiration.
His are the shoulders on which we now stand.
Alan MacDiarmid ka ki a ia, te putaiao he tangata
Ko Alan MacDiarmid, kua noho tahi i tenei wa , ki ona matua me ona hoa.
E Alan MacDiarmid, haere, haere, haere.
Left to right: Sue Keall - School of Biological Sciences (VUW), Alan, Charles Swindells - US Ambassador to NZ, Prof Charles Daugherty - AVC Research (VUW)
