Chemistry Nobel 2025 is out: How the 3 winners ‘created room’ to make chemistry more useful

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year is out . The winners — Richard Robson, Susumu Kitagawa, and Omar Yaghi — have been honoured for creating molecular constructions with ‘rooms’ in between in which desired gases or chemicals can be stored. One of the laureates, Omar Yaghi, grew up in a one-room house in Amman, with no electricity or running water.

The three have “developed a new form of molecular architecture. In their constructions, metal ions function as cornerstones that are linked by long organic (carbon-based) molecules. Together, the metal ions and molecules are organised to form crystals that contain large cavities. These porous materials are called metal-organic frameworks (MOF). By varying the building blocks used in the MOFs, chemists can design them to capture and st