TOKYO, Sept 3 (Bernama-Kyodo) -- Japan's Hideki Shirakawa, a 2000 Nobel laureate in chemistry known for his discovery and development of conductive polymers, died in late August, his family said Thursday, Kyodo News reported.
Shirakawa, 90, a professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, was the ninth Japanese to win a Nobel Prize and the second from the country to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry after Kenichi Fukui in 1981.
He shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 with American scientists Alan Heeger and Alan MacDiarmid.
Their discovery, demonstrating that plastics can conduct electricity, has a wide range of applications by combining the electrical conductivity of metals with the flexibility of polymers.
He graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, now known as the Institute of Science Tokyo, in 1966 and later joined the University of Pennsylvania as a researcher. He became a professor at the University of Tsukuba in 1982.
Shirakawa served for two years on an expert panel of the government's science and technology policy-making body.
-- BERNAMA-KYODO