The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1953 was awarded to Hermann Staudinger "for his discoveries in the field of macromolecular chemistry".
 

What links natural products like rubber and cellulose with artificial plastics is that they are made up from extraordinarily large molecules. Staudinger's proposal about the structure of large molecules appeared in a paper published in 1920, during the course of his studies on the chemistry of rubber. Contrary to this view, Staudinger proposed that these molecules are in fact made from giant chain-like compounds, which are formed by links of short repeating molecular units joined through chemical interactions, and that these could be constructed to almost any length. Staudinger's pioneering ideas laid the foundation for the modern plastics industry, with chemists able to modify elements in chemical chains to create new artificial materials for a host of uses.