born April 14, 1927, Masterson, N.Z.
U.S. chemist.
He earned Ph.D.'s in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1953) and the University of Cambridge (1955). He then began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, becoming Blanchard Professor of Chemistry there in 1988. With Alan J. Heeger and Shirakawa Hideki , he demonstrated that certain plastics can be chemically altered to be almost as conductive as metals. The discovery led scientists to uncover other conductive polymers, which contributed to the growing field of molecular electronics. In 2000 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Heeger and Shirakawa.