Hideki Shirakawa met the press at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Thursday and shared his thoughts about the Nobel Prize in chemistry he will receive together with two American scientists Sunday.
Shirakawa, 64, professor emeritus of Tsukuba University, has been named recipient of the Nobel Prize together with Alan Heeger, 64, and Alan MacDiarmid, 73, for their work on conductive polymers -- plastics that are able to conduct electricity.
According to Shirakawa, their work was instrumental in making it possible to develop smaller semiconductors at a time when silicon was reaching its limit in creating small microchips.
At the press conference, Shirakawa said the basic idea underlying conductive polymers was in itself not new. Rather, he said it was the discovery that a shift of one molecule could make it much easier to conduct electricity through polymers that was significant.