Opinion Express View on Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Celebration of molecular innovation for environmental solutions

Over five decades ago, Richard Robson was building molecular models out of wooden balls and rods for his students at the University of Melbourne. Each hole had to be drilled with precision to reflect the geometry of atomic bonding. But as the models came together, Robson had an epiphany: The placement of the holes — not the connections themselves — determined the overall structure. What if, he wondered, atoms could be coaxed into forming larger architectures, guided by their own geometric preferences? When Robson combined copper ions with multi-armed molecules, they self-organised into a crystalline framework with large cavities. In 1989, in a paper, Robson suggested such materials could possess novel properties. The work would lay the structural foundation “for the development of metal-organic frameworks” that has won Robson, Susumu Kitagawa, and Omar M Yaghi the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The very idea of engineering empty space — to design the voids in which molecules may wander, interact or be captured — stands as a conceptual turn, especially in an era beset by climate-induced crises. In championing the re‐engineering of molecular space as crucial to environmental and technological redress, the award signals a pivot. As tools for carbon sequestration, pollutant removal, and water extraction from air, metal-organic frameworks built from metals and organic (carbon-based) molecules hold out promise for what the Nobel Committee termed as “new opportunities for solving some of the challenges we face”.

Advertisement

There is another takeaway from this recognition of the new grammar of space. Kitagawa, professor at Kyoto University, with his history of innovation in hybrid coordination compounds, has pushed the boundary of how porous materials can respond to stimuli; Robson remains a pioneer in coordination polymers; while Yaghi, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, often considered the architect of reticular design, has shepherded theory into experiments and then into applications. Their combined oeuvre underscores an intellectual lineage that comes together in a lattice of curiosity, collaboration and iteration, each insight threading into the next, refracting through time and transforming chemistry into a discipline not only of matter but of possibility.