Together with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, John Bannister Goodenough received the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of lithium-ion batteries. He is also the oldest ever Nobel Prize recipient. Throughout his long and successful career he has often been on the list of possible Nobel Laureates, and he has received several prestigious awards, such as the National Medal of Science in 2013 and the Enrico Fermi Award in 2009. Receiving the Nobel news he says was a “wonderful surprise” and in his interview with Adam Smith from Nobel Media he advised researchers, “Don’t retire too early,” something he indeed is a living example of.

Against all odds

John was born in 1922, in Jena, Germany, but he grew up near New Haven, Connecticut, USA. His father was a scholar on the history of religion at Yale. In an interview in Quartz 2015 Goodenough describes his upbringing as difficult and his parents as very distant to him. On top of that he also suffered from dyslexia, something that at that time went untreated.At the age of 12 he was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts and he basically lost touch with his parents. In a Chemical & Engineers interview he described the importance of nature growing up and especially a bicycle ride that made him realize the importance of being surrounded by nature. He realized that people growing up exposed to the country probably understood a lot of things that people growing up in cities did not.

But somehow Goodenough managed a place and an aid package at Yale University to study mathematics. During World War II, after Pearl Harbor, he was advised to volunteer for a post in meteorology and then he graduated with a mathematics degree from Yale in 1944. He subsequently completed a PhD in physics at the University of Chicago in 1952, became drawn to material science and started research on magnetism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Lab. During his time at MIT, where he worked for more than 20 years, he laid the groundwork for the development of the random-access memory (RAM) for the digital computer.

In the late 1970s he became Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford. It was during his time in Oxford that he made the discoveries that earned him a Nobel Prize. It was in 1979 that he developed the first rechargeable lithium-ion battery and since then he has dedicated his career to making the battery safer and more efficient. Despite the commercial success of the lithium-ion battery, Goodenough earned no royalties, Oxford had declined to patent his cathode and in the end, he signed away the royalty rights to the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, a UK government lab south of Oxford, hoping that at least his invention might reach the market.

A necessary challenge

In 1986 Goodenough joined the University of Texas, Austin, where he is still an active professor, performing research and supervising graduate students. Currently he is working on how to develop a polymer that has an immobilized liquid in it, so that it conducts lithium or sodium as fast as in the liquid, which he described when Nobel Media spoke to him just after the Nobel Prize announcement.

Despite his age Goodenough has not given up hope of making a super-battery, one that will make electric cars truly competitive with combustion and also economically store wind and solar power.

The problem however is a hard one to solve, trying to make an anode out of pure lithium or sodium metal. If possible the super-battery would have 60 percent more energy than current lithium-ion cells. So quite a challenge, but a necessary one he says. In an interview in Quartz in 2015 he has said he thinks the field has three decades to succeed and commercialize the breakthrough before truly grave problems arise within the environment and there are resource shortages. This, and getting to see his last PhD student graduate is one top of his wish list.