Alan Graham MacDiarmid, ONZ FRS

Early life and education

MacDiarmid was born in Masterton, New Zealand, as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from library books.

MacDiarmid was educated at Hutt Valley High School and Victoria University of Wellington.

In 1943, MacDiarmid passed the University of New Zealand's University Entrance Exam and its Medical Preliminary Exam. He then took up a part-time job as a "lab boy" or janitor at Victoria University of Wellington during his studies for a BSc degree, which he completed in 1947.

Career and research

MacDiarmid worked in the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland for a year as a member of the junior faculty. He then took a faculty position in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, United States, where he became a full professor in 1964. MacDiarmid spent the greater part of his career on the chemistry faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked for 45 years. He was appointed Blanchard Professor of Chemistry in 1988.

In 2002 MacDiarmid also joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Conductive polymers

His best-known research was the discovery and development of conductive polymers—plastic materials that conduct electricity. He collaborated with the Japanese chemist Hideki Shirakawa and the American physicist Alan Heeger in this research and published the first results in 1977. The three of them shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

The Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery that plastics can, after certain modifications, be made electrically conductive.

  • In 2000 the Royal Society of New Zealand awarded him its top honour, the Rutherford Medal. which is the highest honour the country awards.
  • MacDiarmid was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003
  • In 2004, he received the Friendship Award, the highest honour of the People's Republic of China for foreign experts.
  • The Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas was named after him posthumously in 2007.
  • The Alan G. MacDiarmid Institute at Jilin University in China was named after him since 2001.
  • MacDiarmid Place in Lower Hutt, built in 2013 on the grounds of the closed Waiwhetu School of which he was a pupil, is named after Alan MacDiarmid.

Personal life

Towards the end of his life, MacDiarmid was ill with myelodysplastic syndrome. In early February 2007 he was planning to travel back to New Zealand, when he fell down the stairs in his home in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and died on 7 February 2007. He is buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill.

MacDiarmid's first wife, Marian Mathieu, who he had married in 1954,

MacDiarmid was also active as a naturist and nudist, and considered himself a sun-worshipper and keen waterskier.

References

  • including the Nobel Lecture Synthetic Metals": A Novel Role for Organic Polymers
  • McDiarmid Institute Web Site
  • from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
  • MacDiarmid's Page at The University of Texas at Dallas
  • MacDiarmid's page at the University of Pennsylvania
  • New Zealand Edge biography
  • List of MacDiarmid's publications
  • Interview with Alan MacDiarmid Freeview video provided by the Vega Science Trust.