The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists who created revolutionary porous materials that can harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and remove toxins from water.
Susumu Kitagawa, of Kyoto University, Richard Robson, of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi, of the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 11m Swedish kronor (about £871,400) prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
The trio found ways to combine metal ions and organic molecules into highly porous structures through which liquids and gases could flow. Tens of thousands of such materials have since been made for applications ranging from storing hydrogen to removing forever chemicals from water and recovering valuable rare earth metals from waste.
The scientists were honoured “for the development of metal-organic frameworks”, or MOFs, which have such potential that they have been called the material of the 21st century.
Speaking at the prize announcement, Prof Heiner Linke, the chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry, said: “They have found ways to create materials, entirely novel materials with large cavities on the inside, which can be seen almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material.
“A small amount of such material can be almost like Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter. It can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume.”
The research began in 1989 with Robson, a chemist born in Glusburn, West Yorkshire, who moved to Australia after studying at Oxford and Stanford universities. Inspired by the structure of diamonds, he combined copper ions with a four-armed molecule to make pyramid-shaped molecules. These bonded together to form crystals strewn with cavities.
Robson realised the potential for the structures but they were unstable and tended to fall apart. It took further work from Kitagawa and Yaghi to turn metal-organic frameworks into the valuable materials they are today.
Kitagawa showed that similar structures based on cobalt, nickel and zinc were not only stable but could be used to store and release methane, nitrogen and oxygen. He went on to show that MOFs could be tailored to different tasks and even made from flexible materials.
Reached by the Nobel committee, Kitagawa said he was “deeply honoured and delighted” to receive the prize. Asked about his hopes for the future, Kitagawa said he wanted to use MOFs to extract important elements such as carbon and oxygen from the air and with green energy turn them into useful materials. “This is my dream,” he said.
Yaghi became fascinated with chemistry at the age of 10 after sneaking into the school library, which was usually locked, and plucking a book at random from the shelves. He was brought up with his siblings in a single room in Amman, Jordan, with no running water or electricity. At his father’s insistence he went to study in the US.
Frustrated with the traditional way of building new molecular structures, Yaghi developed a more precise approach that was more like assembling pieces of Lego into large crystals. In the 1990s, he revealed MOFs that resembled nets held together with copper or cobalt. Later, he created an extraordinary zinc-based MOF. A couple of grams held an area as large as a football pitch, meaning it could absorb a vast amount of gas for its size.
Dr Becky Greenaway, a chemist at Imperial College London, said: “Lots of chemists have been wondering when metal-organic frameworks would get the Nobel prize, and it’s finally happened.
“Their discovery has enabled a whole range of applications, from gas storage and separations to drug delivery, and also opened up other areas, including porous liquids – liquids with holes in – which are showing promise in carbon capture and catalysis.”
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