Conducting polymers

The linear-backbone "polymer blacks" (polyacetylene, polypyrrole, and polyaniline) and their copolymers are the main class of conductive polymers. Historically, these are known as Melanins. In 1963 Australians DE Weiss and coworkers reported iodine-doped oxidized polypyrrole blacks with resistivities as low as 1 ohm/cm. Subsequent papers reported resistances as low as 0.03 Ohm/cm. With the notable exception of Charge transfer complexes (some of which are even superconductors), organic molecules had previously been considered insulators or at best weakly conducting semiconductors.
Over a decade later in 1977, Shirakawa, Heeger, and MacDiarmid reported equivalent high conductivity in rather similarly oxidized and iodine-doped polyacetylene. They later received the 2000 Nobel prize in chemistry for " The discovery and development of conductive polymers ".