After laying the scientific foundation for the field, Dr. Pope, together with Charles E. Swenberg, the final text “Electronic Processes in Organic Crystals and Polymers”. The 1,300-page book, first published in 1982, remains the leading reference in the field of organic semiconductors.
dr. Pope, who focused on basic research, had few patents and did not try to profit from his discoveries.
In 2006, the Royal Society awarded Dr. Pope de Davy Medal, which is awarded annually to a scientist whose research has contributed to extraordinary progress in every field of chemistry. Several people who built on the work of Dr. Pope have won Nobel Prizes. In 2000, the Chemistry Prize was jointly awarded to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for inventing a technique to make plastic conduct electricity.
“In a way, Martin Pope’s work was a prelude to all that,” Sir John Meurig Thomas, chemistry professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, said in an interview in 2011. (He died in 2020.)
Martin Pope was born Isidore Poppick on August 22, 1918 in a tenement house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents, Phillip and Anna, were both Jewish immigrants who had come to New York from Poland as teenagers. His father worked as a laborer in a fur store and stretched animal skins.
“We were completely dependent on whether the times were good enough for people to buy fur coats,” said Dr. Pope in the 2011 interview.
In 1938, 20-year-old Isidore Poppick, while a student at City College of New York and studying physical chemistry, published a research paper in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.
