Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi share Nobel Prize in chemistry

STOCKHOLM: Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in the development of metal–organic frameworks that dates back to 1989.

Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the chemistry prize in Stockholm on Wednesday. It was the third prize announced this week.

The Nobel committee said that the three laureates “have created molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow.”

“These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyse chemical reactions,” the Nobel Committee said in a statement.

Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia, Kitagawa, 74, with Japan’s Kyoto University and Yaghi, 60, with the University of California, Berkeley.

The trio’s research dates back to 1989.

“Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a news release.

There have been 116 chemistry prizes given to 195 individuals between 1901 and 2024.

The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made.

The first Nobel Prize of 2025 was announced on Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.

Tuesday's physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunnelling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

This year's Nobel announcements continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and the economics prize next Monday.

The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.

By RSS/AP