New Delhi, Oct 8 – Three scientists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing metal‑organic frameworks, or MOFs. The laureates – Japan’s Susumu Kitagawa, Australia’s Richard Robson and the United States’ Omar Y. Yaghi – created molecular structures that form large, maze‑like spaces where gases and liquids can move.
Metal‑organic frameworks are tiny crystals built from metal ions that act like connectors linked by long, carbon‑based organic molecules. These crystals contain huge pockets that can trap specific substances. By swapping the metal or the connector molecules, chemists can design MOFs to do almost anything: capture carbon dioxide, pull toxic gases out of a room, break down harmful pharmaceuticals, or even collect water from desert air.
“This new class of materials opens up a world of possibilities for engineered chemicals,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “MOFs allow us to build custom‑made materials with functions we never imagined before.”
Since the 1990s, chemists worldwide have made tens of thousands of different MOFs. Some help clean drinking water of PFAS pollutants, others destroy trace amounts of drugs in the environment, and several are being tested for large‑scale carbon capture. A few prototypes even harvest water from humid air in places that would normally be water‑scarce.
The three Nobel laureates bring a wealth of experience. Kitagawa earned his PhD at Kyoto University in 1979, Robson earned a doctorate at Oxford in 1962 and now teaches at the University of Melbourne, and Yaghi, born in Jordan, earned a PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign in 1990 and is now a professor at UC Berkeley. The Swedish Academy will split 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) among them.
The Nobel Committee announced the award on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences website. The prize highlights how a single scientific discovery can spark many practical solutions, from cleaner air and water to safer industrial processes.
Source: ianslive
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