Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to scientist trio for Harry Potter-like work in molecular architecture

By Christian Edwards, Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — A trio of scientists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing “metal-organic frameworks,” a form of molecular architecture that packs vast amounts of space into tiny structures – which the committee likened to Hermione Granger’s handbag in the Harry Potter novels.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi will share the prize for their groundbreaking discoveries that could help tackle some of the planet’s most pressing problems, like climate change, the Nobel Committee announced Wednesday at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

Heiner Linke, chair of the committee for chemistry, said the laureates’ discoveries and insights had led to completely new materials that can “store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume.”

Linke compared the materials to Hermione’s handbag, which appears small on the outside but is far larger on the inside. In another analogy, he said the materials function “like rooms in a hotel,” where huge groups of molecules can enter and exit as if they were guests.

The committee praised the laureates for creating metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which “can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions.”

Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at University of California, Berkeley who was born in Jordan, was transiting flights when he got the call informing him he was a Nobel laureate. He said he was “astonished, delighted and overwhelmed” to have won the prize.

“My parents could barely read or write. It’s been quite a journey, science allows you to do it,” Yaghi told the Nobel Committee. Yaghi and his many siblings were raised in a single room in Amman, Jordan, with no electricity or running water. School was a refuge from his otherwise challenging life, the committee said.

‘The usefulness of useless’

More than 100,000 metal-organic frameworks have been reported to date, according to Kim Jelfs, a professor of chemistry at Imperial College London.

“The applications of MOFs all stem from their porosity – one gram of a MOF material can have the same surface area inside its pores as a football pitch,” Jelfs said.

The inception of these new materials came when Robson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, was teaching students in 1974 about molecular structures by turning wooden balls into models of atoms.

When deciding where to drill holes in the wooden balls, Robson realized that a huge amount of chemical information depended on the position of the holes. He wondered what would happen if he linked together different types of molecules rather than individual atoms, and whether this could create new types of materials.

Although Robson took more than a decade to put his theory to the test, his experiments in the 1980s proved his hunch was correct. Using copper, Robson showed that the molecules organized themselves into a regular molecular structure – like how carbon atoms band together to form a diamond.

But unlike diamonds, where the molecular structure is extremely compact, Robson’s material contained a huge number of large cavities, suggesting this could lead to the creation of new materials.

Kitagawa, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, built on Robson’s findings. Initially, Kitagawa was not convinced by the practical uses of these materials, but the committee said the chemist’s career has been driven by finding “the usefulness of useless.” Kitagawa began to research the potential for creating porous molecular structures, presenting his first one in 1992. Even then, research funders were not overly impressed.

It was not until 1997 that Kitagawa made his first major breakthrough, developing a new molecule that could absorb and release methane, nitrogen and oxygen.

Meanwhile, at Arizona State University, Yaghi – who moved to the US from Jordan aged 15 – used Kitagawa’s and Robson’s research to develop a completely new metal-organic framework, MOF-5, which the committee said “became a classic” in the field of chemistry. Even when empty, this structure can be heated to 570 degrees Fahrenheit (300 degrees Celsius) without collapsing.

Sucking water out of desert air

Being able to pack a vast number of cavities in such a small space allowed Yaghi’s research group to suck water from the desert air of Arizona.

“During the night, their MOF material captured water vapor from the air. When dawn came and the sun heated the material, they were able to collect the water,” the committee said.

The laureates’ research has a vast array of real-world uses, and could provide a way to combat climate change by capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Other uses include removing “forever chemicals” from water and breaking down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment.

“You could in principle absorb carbon dioxide and then instead of releasing it into the atmosphere you could then collect it in a device,” said Sara Snogerup, a professor of physical chemistry at Lund University in Sweden. “That’s a strong hope… but then, of course, you’d need to use it on a really big scale.”

Last year, the prize was awarded to a trio of scientists who used artificial intelligence to “crack” the code of almost all known proteins, the “chemical tools of life.” Among them was Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind in London, whose work helped develop an AI model to predict the complex structures of proteins – a problem that had been unsolved for 50 years.

In 2023, the prize was shared by three researchers who worked to discover and develop quantum dots, used in LED lights and TV screens, as well as by surgeons when removing cancer tissue.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

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