Elmer Keiser Bolton
When Wallace Carothers arrived at DuPont in 1928 one of the tasks his group took on was the development of new synthetic fibers for textiles. At that time a number of natural polymers such as latex and cellulose were in common use, rayon as a semisynthetic from nitrated cellulose had recently been improved and begun upending the textile industries, and some fully synthetic polymers such as bakelite were also known and being used for certain applications, but the existing fully synthetic polymers could not be drawn into fibers and spun into thread, so great opportunity existed to manufacture thread and yarn from synthetic polymers to join or replace the existing fibers in the market (natural fibers such as cotton, wool, linen, and silk and artificial fiber in the various recently emerged types of rayon).
Bert Meijer
Meijer's career took off with breakthrough results in dendrimer chemistry including a dendritic box and super-amphiphiles (being the first examples of polymersomes). He synthesized poly(propylene imine) dendrimers that are now produced at commercially relevant quantities (at multiple kilogram scale) worldwide. His dendrimers form the basic compound of a phosphate binder currently used in the clinic. Meijer also developed novel semiconducting polymers with high electron mobilities. His exploration of the combination of chirality and mesoscopic morphology in these polymers led to the fabrication of an LED that emits circularly polarized light. Many years later the insights into chiral semiconductors were used to optimize the water splitting in a photoelectrochemical cell.