Why Did the Nobel Prize Begin With a Failed Experiment? Shirakawa, Polyacetylene and Hyung Chick Pyun

In short: The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — for plastics that conduct electricity — began in a Tokyo laboratory in 1967, with an experiment that looked like a failure. The researcher who ran that first experiment was Hyung Chick Pyun, a visiting scientist from Korea. His name did not appear among the authors of the first paper; it remained only in the acknowledgments. This article follows the record honestly, without accusing anyone of stealing credit.

Why was polyacetylene a wall?

Plastic built the modern world because it is light and slow to decay — and because of one absolute rule: it does not conduct electricity. That is precisely why electric wires are wrapped in it. Polyacetylene, a plastic made of acetylene molecules linked into long chains, looked different on paper: its alternating single and double bonds seemed to hold a path for electrons. But whenever anyone made it, all they got was a black powder — impossible to shape, impossible to measure. To be useful, it had to become a thin film, and against that wall the research stood still.

What happened in Tokyo in 1967?

Point	What the record shows
The experiment	Pyun, a 40-year-old visiting researcher in Professor Sakuji Ikeda's laboratory, ran a standard polyacetylene preparation — and ragged pieces of film appeared instead of black powder
Shirakawa's memory	The catalyst amount went wrong — millimoles somehow became moles, nearly a thousand times too much; he refused to decide who mishandled the unit
Pyun's memory	He never added the wrong amount; he deliberately slowed the stirring, and a film formed after the stirrer stopped
What everyone agrees on	The person who ran that experiment was Pyun, and its result opened the door

Most people, faced with an experiment that looks like a failure, empty the vessel and move on. Hideki Shirakawa, then a young research assistant, did not throw the ragged pieces away. Repeating the experiment one condition at a time, he found the decisive difference — catalyst concentration — and turned the accident into a method that could be repeated at will. The films had a silvery, metallic luster: a plastic had begun to shine like a metal. Stories where the first scene matters this much include Robert Recorde and the equals sign.

Where did Pyun's name end up?

• 1971: Shirakawa and Ikeda published the first paper reporting the film. Pyun's name was not among the authors — only a single line of thanks, in initials, in the acknowledgments.
• 1976: Shirakawa crossed the ocean alone to work with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger. There he met the key concept: doping — mixing a tiny amount of another substance into a material to change its properties in a large way.
• November 23, 1976: Bromine vapor touched the film, and its electrical conductivity leapt in an instant by about ten million times. With halogen doping it could rise to nearly a billion times the original.
• 2000: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Shirakawa, Heeger, and MacDiarmid for the discovery and development of conductive polymers.

In the closing of his Nobel lecture, Shirakawa reached back to that old Tokyo laboratory and spoke Pyun's name aloud, leaving his thanks to the man who had shared what he called a fortuitous error. The name had not been erased — in the most official place of all, it was spoken. Recognition arriving late and incomplete is a pattern this channel has met before, in Wally Funk's 60-year wait for space.

What remains disputed?

Pyun returned to Korea wanting to continue the research, but his superiors discouraged it, and he retired from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute in 1991; he died in 2018. Late in life he set down a memoir carrying his regret that the recognition for the man who first made the film had been too small. In 2021 the historian Seth Rasmussen published an analysis of that memoir, and in 2022 Shirakawa, at eighty-six, published a reply. To choose one side and declare it settled would not be honest. Only three things are certain: the man who first made the film was Pyun; the man who turned a failure into a principle was Shirakawa; and conductive plastic came into the world layer upon layer — a trigger, an elucidation, and a collaboration that crossed an ocean.

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What lesson does this story leave?

A discovery does not belong to one person. A chance trigger, the tenacity that refused to throw it away, and a collaboration across borders were layered one upon another and became a Nobel Prize. The world we do not yet know opens, again and again, in places that look like failure — and remembering both the one who made the first film and the one who would not discard it is the most honest comfort this story leaves us.

FAQ

Q: Who was Hyung Chick Pyun?
A: A Korean researcher from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, visiting Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1967, who ran the experiment that first produced polyacetylene as a film.

Q: Did Shirakawa steal Pyun's discovery?
A: The record does not support that simple claim, and this article does not make it. The two men's memories of the key day still disagree; what is documented is the acknowledgment-only credit in 1971 and Shirakawa's public thanks in his Nobel lecture.

Q: What is doping, in simple terms?
A: Mixing a very small amount of another substance into a material to change its properties in a large way — the same idea today's semiconductor industry stands on. Applied to polyacetylene film, it raised conductivity by up to nearly a billion times.

Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/7sF9M2Db25o

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