Abstract
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three researchers who developed the lithium-ion battery. One of the three, Akira Yoshino, honorary fellow at the Japanese chemical company Asahi Kasei, was not trying to discover a new battery. “I didn’t know about conventional wisdom in the field of battery technology,” Yoshino recalls. His lack of expertise, he believes, is precisely what made his research breakthrough possible. “Doubt conventional wisdom” was a motto of professor Kenichi Fukui at Kyoto University, an earlier chemistry Nobel Prize winner under whom Yoshino studied. Yoshino is the eighth Japanese scholar to win a chemistry Nobel Prize but only the second from the country who hails from industry. He began researching polyacetylene as a battery material in 1981 and created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery in 1985. Katsumori Matsuoka interviewed Yoshino for C&EN at the Tokyo headquarters of Asahi Kasei soon after he won the
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