Three scientists share Nobel Prize in chemistry
Scientists Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of “metal-organic frameworks,” the awarding body said.
The more than century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, with winners sharing 11 million Swedish krona ($A1.8 million) as well as the fame of winning the world’s most prestigious science prize.
“Guests have found ways to create completely new materials, with large spaces inside them that can almost be seen as rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and exit again through the same material,” Heiner Linke, chairman of the Nobel Committee on Chemistry, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“A small amount of this type of material could be almost like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter. It could store large amounts of gas in a small volume.”
The three laureates worked to create molecular structures with large areas through which gases and other chemicals could flow and could be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide and store toxic gases.
Kitagawa is a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, Robson is a professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Yaghi is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
“Through the development of metal-organic frameworks, they have provided chemists with new opportunities to solve some of the challenges we face,” the awarding body said. he said.
The Chemistry Nobel was the third prize announced in this year’s crop of prizes, in keeping with tradition, following the medicine and physics awards announced earlier this year.
Established in the will of the Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace have been awarded since 1901, mostly with a few interruptions due to world wars.
Nobel himself was a chemist, and his developments in this field helped support the fortune he amassed from his invention of dynamite in the 19th century.
The Economics Prize is a later addition funded by the Swedish Central Bank.
Sometimes overshadowed by more famous accolades in the fields of physics, literature and peace, the Chemistry Awards have recognized many influential discoveries such as nuclear fission, DNA sequencing techniques and yeast.
The 2024 Chemistry Prize went to US scientists David Baker and John Jumper and Briton Demis Hassabis for making advances in areas such as solving the structure of proteins and creating new ones, and drug development.
