Nobel prize-winner leaves future scientists a remarkable legacy

By Associate Professor Allan Blackman

This article was orignally published in the Otago Daily Times on Monday 5 March 2007.

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The first instalment of Chemistry Matters, which appeared in the ODT on April 2, 2001, was inspired by the announcement of the award of the Nobel prize in chemistry to New Zealander Alan MacDiarmid in 2000, and the subject matter of that first column was his prize-winning research.

Sadly, Prof MacDiarmid passed away on February 7 in the United States as he was preparing to travel to Wellington to participate in the third International Conference for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, organised by the MacDiarmid Institute.

I had planned to write about his life’s work in this column. However, what follows is, I believe, much more appropriate; a story he himself used in his Nobel prize address in Stockholm on December 8, 2000, which concerns the way in which scientific progress is made.The dependency of any one person’s research on the labours of scores of earlier scientific pioneers is illustrated very beautifully by a few sentences of this variation from a book by Olive Schreiner, written at the turn of the [20th] century, entitled, "The Story of an African Farm".

The story concerns a young hunter who, in his youth, heard about the great white bird of "absolute truth" which lived at the very top of a high mountain far in the east. He had spent all his life seeking it without success — and now he was growing old. The old thin hands cut the stone ill and jaggedly, for the fingers were stiff and bent. The beauty and strength of the man were gone. At last, an old, wizened, shrunken face looked out above the rocks. He saw the eternal mountains still rising to the white clouds high above him.

The old hunter folded his tired hands and lay down by the precipice where he had worked away his life. “I have sought," he said, "for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. By the rough and twisted path hewn by countless others before me, I have slowly and laboriously climbed. I have not rested. I have not repined. And I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down, worn out, other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I, and those before me, have cut, they will climb; by the stairs that we have built, they will mount. They will never know those who made them, their names are forgotten in the mists of time. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll, they will curse us; but they will mount, and on our work they will climb, and by our stair! They will find her, and through us!" The tears rolled from beneath the shrivelled eyelids. If truth had appeared above him in the clouds now, he could not have seen her; the mist of death was in his eyes.

. . . Then slowly from the white sky above, through the still air, came something falling . . . falling . . . falling. Softly it fluttered down and dropped on to the breast of the dying man.

He felt it with his hands — it was — a feather.

Alan MacDiarmid’s research will be built on by future generations of scientists and we can only guess at the advances that will be made as a result of his pioneering work. He will be sorely missed, but his remarkable legacy will endure.

A memorial service for Alan MacDiarmid will be held in Wellington on March 16. Those wishing to send a message to be included in a book of condolence can do so by emailing nobel@rsnz.org.