Three scientists shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing a new kind of molecular architecture: metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, crystals laced with cavities large enough for molecules to slip in and out.
Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson, along with Omar M. Yaghi, share the prize for designing these porous structures. Chemists have since built tens of thousands of them, using the materials to pull drinking water from desert air, strip pollutants and PFAS from water, pull carbon dioxide from the air and hold hydrogen.
The idea traces to 1974, when Robson, then teaching at the University of Melbourne, drilled holes into wooden balls for students to build molecules and realized the geometry held the key to linking larger structures. By 1989 he had combined copper ions with a four-armed molecule to grow an orderly crystal full of hollows, publishing the work in the American Chemical Society’s journal.
Kitagawa pushed the field further in Japan. In 1997 his group built three-dimensional frameworks threaded with open channels that could take in and give off methane, nitrogen and oxygen while holding their shape. Yaghi, who grew up in a single room in Amman, Jordan, moved to the United States at 15; by 1999 he had created MOF-5, a compound whose surface area in a few grams rivaled a soccer field.
Olof Ramström, a member of the Nobel committee, compared the structures to a wizard’s charmed handbag, “small on the outside but very, very large on the inside.” The list of what MOFs can do, he added, “goes on and on and on.”
The three laureates will split 11 million Swedish kronor, worth more than $1.1 million. Yaghi learned of the award at an airport, his phone buzzing while he collected his luggage. “It was absolutely thrilling,” he told reporters.
Sources
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 – Popular information – NobelPrize.org
- Like Hermione’s magic handbag for chemists, MOFs can stash a lot of stuff
