Scientists Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi were announced on Wednesday as the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The trio earned the honour for creating metal‑organic frameworks (MOFs) – tiny, cage‑like structures with huge internal spaces that let gases and liquids flow through them.
MOFs are more than a laboratory curiosity. Researchers now use them to pull water from the air in deserts, capture and store carbon dioxide, trap toxic gases, and speed up chemical reactions. The prize recognises how these versatile materials could help tackle climate change, clean water supplies and clean up pollutants.
Kitagawa is a professor at Kyoto University, Japan. In a press‑conference speech he said the award touched him deeply. “I dream of turning the air we breathe into useful products—clean water, oxygen, even fuels—using renewable energy,” he told reporters. He added that real challenges keep chemistry exciting.
Omar Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tells his story with humility. Born in Jordan to a family of Palestinian refugees who lived in a single‑room house, Yaghi’s family barely spoke reading or writing. “Science levels the playing field,” he said. He laughed that he was only ten when a book on molecules sparked a lifelong passion for chemistry.
The origins of MOFs stretch back to 1989 when Richard Robson, then in his late twenties, fled Britain for Australia. He was fascinated by diamond’s crystal lattice and mixed copper ions with a four‑armed molecule. The result was a pyramid‑shaped unit that linked into a crystalline framework filled with tiny voids. Though promising, the early structures collapsed during use. Kitagawa and Yaghi later stabilised the designs, turning them into practical, robust materials.
Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said, “Metal‑organic frameworks have enormous potential, opening ways to custom‑made materials with functions we could not see before.” Since the original discovery, chemists have synthesized tens of thousands of different MOFs, each with unique properties.
Many of these new MOFs aim to solve pressing global problems. They can separate dangerous PFAS chemicals from drinking water, break down trace pharmaceuticals in the environment, capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, and extract moisture from arid air for rural communities. As nations seek smarter approaches to environmental challenges, MOFs are quickly moving from scientific papers to real‑world solutions.
Source: ianslive
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