Story: Awards and prizes

In this 2003 photo, Nobel science laureates Alan MacDiarmid (left) and Alan Heeger unveil a plaque at Victoria University of Wellington. The plaque marks the former home of an earlier Nobel laureate, Maurice Wilkins. Together with Francis Crick and James Watson, Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for discovery of the double-helix form of the DNA molecule, a form which appears on the plaque. Fellow New Zealander MacDiarmid, together with Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for their discovery of conducting polymers.