The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 12 announced the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Hideki Shirakawa of Japan and two Americans for their "revolutionary discovery" that plastic can be made electrically conductive.

Shirakawa, 64, a professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, was chosen the Nobel laureates along with Alan J. Heeger, 64, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Alan G. MacDiarmid, 73, of the University of Pennsylvania. The three researchers will share the prize money of 9 million Swedish kronor (about 100 million yen).

The academy, according to the citation, named them for the "discovery and development of conductive polymers" that are now in use in such things as antistatic substances for photographic film, computer screen shields, and small television and cell phone display monitors, reversing the conventional belief that plastics, unlike metals, cannot conduct electricity.

Shirakawa is the ninth Japanese Nobel laureate and the second to receive the prize for chemistry after Kenichi Fukui in 1981. The son of a practicing doctor in Gifu Prefecture, central Japan, Shirakawa liked science most among school subjects and got high marks in it. "I was interested in how to make various kinds of plastics" that found their way into people's daily life in the postwar period, he said.

In a composition written before graduating from a junior high school, Shirakawa wrote that his dream was to study chemistry and physics at a university and create new plastics.

One of his friends said Shirakawa had been "an academic type since high school days. He always told us he wanted to be a scientist." Another friend said he was a good-tempered and well-mannered boy. "He was smart but never showed off," the friend said.

Shirakawa and his like-minded friends occasionally took chemicals out of a science laboratory and conducted explosion experiments on a dry riverbed, some classmates recalled.

Shirakawa is a relative on the paternal side of the grandmother of Naoko Takahashi, who won the gold medal in women's marathon at Sydney Olympics.

Shirakawa said he is sad to say that many young people nowadays seem to be losing interest in science. He wants kids to witness the actual phenomena of physics, chemistry and biology "to get a real feeling of nature," Shirakawa said.

Photo: Shirakawa shows his delight at being awarded the prize. (PANA)