Two Soviet Childhoods
Andre Geim was born on 21 October 1958 in Sochi, on the Black Sea coast of the Soviet Union. His parents were both engineers of German origin. His father descended from Volga Germans, the community deported eastward during the Second World War. His grandfather was sent to a gulag in Siberia for the political crime of being ethnically German, and spent years there before being allowed to rejoin his family in Novosibirsk. At seven, Geim moved with his parents and elder brother to Nalchik, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.
He applied twice to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and was rejected both times. He has attributed the failure to discrimination on account of his German ethnicity. Instead, he was educated at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, known as Phystech, graduating in 1982. His PhD came in 1987 from the Institute of Solid State Physics in Chernogolovka, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences. After the Soviet Union collapsed, he worked at research institutes in Nottingham and Bath before settling at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Konstantin Novoselov was born on 23 August 1974 in Nizhny Tagil, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains, nearly 2,000 kilometres from Sochi. He also studied at Phystech. After graduating, he joined Geim as a PhD student at Nijmegen. When Geim was appointed to a chair at the University of Manchester in 2001, Novoselov followed. Sixteen years apart in age, from opposite ends of the Soviet Union, they arrived in Manchester together and stayed for the best part of two decades.
Friday Night Experiments
Geim had a habit that would have made most research councils nervous. He called them Friday Night Experiments. They were short-term projects, unrelated to his day job, not expected to produce anything substantial, conducted on Friday evenings in the spirit of curiosity rather than career advancement. He tried about two dozen of them over the years. Most led nowhere. Three became famous. That is a success rate of about 12.5 per cent, which is spectacularly good by the standards of experimental physics.
His philosophy was simple: "It's better to be wrong than be boring." He changed his research field every few years, calling his approach grazing shallow, the opposite of what most academics did. Most academics dug one hole and stayed in it. Geim dug dozens and moved on when the digging stopped being interesting.
The first hit was the flying frog. Working at Nijmegen, Geim placed a small frog inside a powerful electromagnet and watched it rise into the air and float. The principle was diamagnetic levitation. Water, which makes up most of a frog, is weakly repelled by magnetic fields. With a strong enough magnet, the repulsion overcomes gravity. The frog was unharmed. The photograph went around the world. In 2000, Geim and the theoretical physicist Michael Berry were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics for the work. He remains the only person in history to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize.
The second was gecko tape, published in Nature Materials in 2003, an adhesive that mimicked the microscopic hairs on gecko feet, allowing a surface to grip and release without any chemical residue. Interesting. Publishable. Not world-changing.
The third Friday Night Experiment was graphene. That one changed the world.
The Scotch Tape
Graphite is the stuff in pencils. It is made of layers of carbon atoms arranged in hexagonal sheets, stacked on top of each other, held together by weak forces. That weakness is why graphite leaves a mark when you draw with it. You are peeling off layers of atoms and leaving them on the page. Each individual layer, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, is called graphene. Physicists had known about it since the 1940s. Nobody believed it could exist on its own. A material one atom thick should be too unstable. It should crumple or decompose.
In 2004, Geim asked a doctoral student from China to polish a piece of graphite down to about ten microns using a specialised machine. The student polished the graphite down to dust instead. The approach was abandoned. But Geim noticed something. The experimenters had been cleaning their graphite samples beforehand using Scotch tape, then throwing the tape away. The flakes of graphite stuck to the discarded tape were finer and thinner than anything the expensive machine had produced. The answer had been in the waste bin all along.
They pressed Scotch tape onto a piece of graphite, peeled it off, folded the tape, pressed it together, and peeled it apart again. Each time the flakes got thinner. Then they transferred what was left onto a wafer of silicon dioxide and looked at it under a microscope. What they saw was graphene. Single layers of carbon atoms, one atom thick, sitting on the silicon surface. They could see them because the silicon dioxide, at exactly the right thickness, produced interference colours that made the otherwise invisible sheets visible. Without that optical trick, nobody would have found them.
The paper was published in Science in October 2004. The scientific community's reaction was a mixture of excitement and embarrassment. Excitement because the material had extraordinary properties that could be measured for the first time. Embarrassment because the technique was so simple that anyone with a roll of tape and a piece of graphite could have done it years earlier. Nobody had, because nobody thought it would work.
"The answer had been in the waste bin all along. Two physicists from the Soviet Union, working at the University of Manchester, found the thinnest material in the universe using sticky tape."
One Atom Thick
Graphene turned out to be remarkable in almost every measurable way. It was the thinnest material ever isolated, literally one atom thick. It was the strongest material ever tested, about 200 times stronger than structural steel by weight. It conducted electricity better than copper at room temperature. It conducted heat better than diamond. It was nearly transparent, absorbing just 2.3 per cent of visible light. It was flexible. It was impermeable to gases, including helium.
For physicists, it was a playground. Electrons moved through it at extraordinary speeds, behaving as if they had no mass, relativistic particles trapped in a two-dimensional sheet. It allowed experiments in quantum physics that had previously been purely theoretical. For engineers and materials scientists, it promised revolutions in everything from electronics to water filtration to battery technology to flexible displays.
The promise has been slow to translate into everyday products. Graphene-enhanced concrete, composites, coatings, and sports equipment exist, but the headline applications, flexible electronics, desalination membranes, next-generation batteries, remain works in progress. The material is extraordinary. Making it at industrial scale, consistently, cheaply, and in the right form for each application, has turned out to be the hard part. That gap between laboratory discovery and commercial reality is the story of most revolutionary materials, and closing it is why Manchester built an entire ecosystem around a discovery made with a roll of tape.
Manchester's Material
The Nobel Prize in Physics came in 2010, awarded "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene." It was just six years after the discovery, one of the shortest gaps between a breakthrough and a Nobel in modern physics. Geim was 51. Novoselov was 36, the youngest physics laureate since Brian Josephson in 1973.
Both were knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours. Geim became a British citizen the same year, having held Dutch citizenship since the 1990s. He received a Knight Bachelor, making him Sir Andre. In 2025, the Netherlands revoked his Dutch citizenship because it does not allow dual nationality, and Geim made a public fuss about it. Novoselov, who holds both British and Russian citizenship, also received a knighthood. Two Soviet-born physicists, now Sir Andre and Sir Konstantin, for work done in a physics laboratory in Manchester with a roll of Scotch tape.
The University of Manchester moved fast to build on the discovery. The National Graphene Institute opened on 20 March 2015, a £61 million facility on Booth Street East funded by £38 million from the UK Government and £23 million from the European Regional Development Fund. The Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre followed in December 2018 in the Masdar Building on the Sackville Street campus, another £60 million, designed to bridge the gap between laboratory research and commercial application. Over £120 million invested in two buildings on the university campus, both betting that Manchester could become the global centre for graphene research and commercialisation.
Novoselov took a position at the National University of Singapore in 2019 and became president of Constructor University in Bremen in 2026, though he remains a part-time Langworthy Professor at Manchester. Geim continues at the university as Regius Professor of Physics, a title created for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. It is the only Regius chair in physics in the country, and it went to a man who couldn't get into a Moscow university. The work goes on.
The science chain in Manchester runs deep. John Dalton did his atomic theory work in the city. James Prescott Joule measured the mechanical equivalent of heat in a Salford brewery. Ernest Rutherford split the atom at the university on Oxford Road. Henry Moseley mapped the periodic table in Rutherford's laboratory before being killed at Gallipoli. Alan Turing ran his first programs on the world's first stored-program computer at Kilburn's lab. And in 2004, two physicists from the Soviet Union, working on a Friday evening, peeled the thinnest material in the universe off a piece of graphite using sticky tape. Manchester has always been a city where people make things. Sometimes the thing they make rewrites the rules.