An American among the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The award was given for the development of metal-organic frameworks, which have numerous practical applications. Omar M. Yaghi shares the prize with Japan’s Susumu Kitagawa and U.K.-born Richard Robson.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Japan's Susumu Kitagawa, American Omar M. Yaghi and U.K.-born Richard Robson won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing metal-organic frameworks, which have numerous practical applications.
"These constructions, called metalorganic frameworks, can be used to recover water from the air in the desert, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions," the Nobel committee said in a statement.
Yaghi, 60, and Kitagawa, 74, had been considered contenders for the chemistry prize, the third award of Nobel week, for several years.
The trio's groundbreaking discoveries were made in the late 1980s and early 2000s.
With these findings, "we can imagine creating materials capable of separating carbon dioxide from air or industrial exhaust pipes, or that could be used to separate toxic molecules from wastewater," explained Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Academy of Sciences that awards the Nobel.
ºThe Nobel committee gave concrete application examples.
Last year's Prize
The chemistry Nobel is the third prize of the season.
Yaghi’s research group, for example, “extracted water from Arizona’s desert air,” he said. “At night, the metal-organic frameworks [MOFs] captured water vapor from the air. When dawn came and the sun warmed the material, they were able to collect the water.”
Separate discoveries
In 1989, Robson, 88, conducted tests using the properties of atoms in a novel way with copper ions. "When they combined, they came together to form a spacious, well-ordered crystal. It was like a diamond filled with countless cavities," the Nobel committee explained.
Robson recognized the potential of his discovery, but the molecular structure was unstable. Kitagawa and Yaghi then provided a “solid basis” for the construction method. Between 1992 and 2003, they each made a series of groundbreaking discoveries.
Kitagawa "demonstrated that gases can move in and out of constructions and predicted that MOFs could be made flexible," the committee said.
Yaghi, in turn, created "a very stable MOF" and showed that it can be modified, giving it "new and attractive" properties, the committee added.
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