Infinite boxes: On the 2025 Chemistry Nobel Prize

It would not be an overstatement to say that metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have redefined what materials can do for society. These porous crystalline structures are built from metal ions coordinated to organic linker molecules and offer gigantic amounts of internal surface area. Their cavities can be tuned to trap greenhouse gases, harvest drinking water from air, and store hydrogen or methane as clean fuels. As industries confront climate change and scarce resources, MOFs exemplify chemistry’s power to reimagine sustainability, atom by atom. The roots of this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize, awarded to the developers of MOFs, go back to the 1980s, when Richard Robson, then at the University of Melbourne, wondered whether molecular architectures could be designed rather than found. Inspired by a ball-and-stick model used for teaching, he combined copper ions with an organic molecule whose four ends bore nitrile groups. Contrary to expectations, the ingredients self-assembled into an ordered, diamond-like crystal loaded with empty cavities. Susumu Kitagawa, working in Japan, picked up on the same spirit and made a breakthrough in 1997 when he built a 3D framework of cobalt, nickel or zinc ions linked by bipyridine molecules. When drained of water, the framework remained intact, allowing the gaps between its atoms to hold and release gases as required. In 1998, he also proposed that MOFs could be made of soft solids that ‘breathed’ as other molecules moved in and out.

Meanwhile in the U.S., Omar Yaghi was dissatisfied with the trial-and-error of conventional reactions and pioneered reticular chemistry, with which he assembled predetermined building blocks into ordered networks. His first frameworks, reported in 1995, were robust two-dimensional nets. By 1999 he unveiled MOF-5, a zinc-based cubic lattice with extraordinary stability and surface area. A few grams contained the internal area of an entire football field. His approach allowed entire families of related MOFs to be designed systematically. Thus, Robson, Kitagawa and Yaghi established a new grammar of matter that allowed others to create thousands of MOFs, some of which moved from prototypes to industrial reactors and semiconductor manufacturing lines. The road ahead is even more promising but also exacting. Researchers are still working to make MOFs more durable in real-world conditions and cheaper to produce at scale. Integrating them into batteries and catalytic filters, for instance, requires engineering as finely tuned as their chemistry. For all these achievements, however, the vision honoured this year transcends any single material. By showing that chemistry can design empty space as precisely as solid matter, the laureates built room not only for molecules but for imagination itself.