have been considered impossible. A member of the Society of Plastics Engineers and of the American Chemical Society, Dr. MacDiarmid is Blanchard Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, the faculty of which he joined in 1955. He holds an M.Sc. from the University of New Zealand, a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (England); Dr. MacDiarmid was also awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Linkoping University (Sweden). He is the author or co-author of some 600-research papers and 20 patents.
(Continued from page 1)
mer. He started research on (SN)x, an unusual polymeric material with metallic conductivity, in 1973. His interest in organic conducting polymers began in 1975 when he was introduced to a new form of polyacetylene by Dr. Shirakawa at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The ensuing collaboration among Dr. MacDiarmid, Dr. Shirakawa, and Dr. Heeger (then at the University of Pennsylvania) led to the historic discovery of metallic conductivity in an organic polymer, a phenomenon that previously would
