Carothers and support for Staudinger Critics of the macromolecular theory of polymers proposed by Hermann Staudinger often argued that giant molecules could not exist. An American scientist named Wallace Hume Carothers (1896–1937) decided to test this premise by attempting to make giant molecules in the laboratory. He succeeded in 1935, silencing one of the major arguments against macromolecules. Carothers also found that his synthetic polymers behaved a lot like natural silk. He tinkered with their design until he arrived at a synthetic polymer which could be used in place of silk, a polymer we now call nylon. The Austrian chemist Herman Francis Mark (1895–1992) later used X-ray crystallography to show that natural polymers were indeed macromolecules.