British scientist among three winners of Nobel prize for chemistry
Richard Robson, 88, studied at the University of Oxford and is now based in Australia.
Three scientists including British-born Richard Robson have won the Nobel prize for chemistry for developing new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside, laying the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
Heiner Linke, chairman of the committee that made the award, compared the structures called metal-organic frameworks to the seemingly bottomless magical handbag carried by Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series.
Another example might be Mary Poppins’ enchanted carpet bag. These containers look small from the outside but are able to hold surprisingly large quantities within.
The committee said Susumu Kitagawa, Yorkshire-born Prof Robson, who studied at the University of Oxford, and Omar M Yaghi were honoured for “ground-breaking discoveries” that “may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges”, from pollution to water scarcity.
Prof Robson, 88, is affiliated with the University of Melbourne in Australia. Prof Kitagawa, 74, is with Japan’s Kyoto University, and Prof Yaghi, 60, is with the University of California, Berkeley.
The chemists worked separately but added to each other’s breakthroughs over decades, beginning with Prof Robson’s work in the 1980s.
The scientists were able to devise stable atomic structures that preserved holes of specific sizes that allowed gas or liquid to flow in and out. The holes can be customised to match the size of specific molecules that scientists or engineers want to hold in place, such as water, carbon dioxide or methane.
“That level of control is quite rare in chemistry,” said Kim Jelfs, a computational chemist at Imperial College London. “It’s really efficient for storing gases.”
A relatively small amount of the structure — which combines metal nodes and organic rods — creates many organised holes and a huge amount of surface area inside.
“If you can store toxic gases it can help address global challenges,” said American Chemical Society president Dorothy Phillips,
Today researchers around the world are exploring possibilities that include using the frameworks to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and pollution from industrial sites. Another possibility is to use them to harvest moisture from desert air, perhaps to one day provide clean drinking water in arid environments.
Scientists are also investigating using the structures for targeted drug delivery. The idea is to load them with medicine that may be slowly released inside the body.
“It could be a better way to deliver low doses continually,” as with cancer drugs, said David Pugh, a chemist at King’s College London.
The research “could be really, really valuable” in many industries, he said. But “there are still challenges when you translate that from the lab to the real world”. For example, many of the structures store the most gas and liquid in very low-temperature, high-pressure environments, he said.
Today, metal-organic frameworks are already being used in some surprising ways, including as part of packing material to keep fruit fresh over long shipping routes, by gradually releasing chemicals that slow down the ripening process.
Prof Yaghi learned that he had won while travelling from San Francisco to Brussels on Wednesday. As he grabbed his luggage and prepared to change flights in Frankfurt, his phone started buzzing with a call from Sweden.
“You cannot prepare for a moment like that,” he said at a news conference. ”The feeling is indescribable, but it’s absolutely thrilling.”
When his phone rang on Wednesday, Prof Kitagawa said he answered “rather bluntly, thinking it must be yet one of those telemarketing calls I’m getting a lot recently”.
“It was such a big prize so I thought, ‘is it really true?’” he recalled during a news conference at Kyoto University. “When one of the experts came on the phone and congratulated me, I finally thought it was real and felt relaxed.”
Prof Kitagawa said the research has been widely recognised in the world of chemistry but “it is very difficult to gain understanding by the ordinary people, and I’m delighted to be recognised”.
Prof Robson, in a phone call with The Associated Press from his home in Melbourne, said he was “very pleased of course and a bit stunned as well”.
He added: “This is a major thing that happens late in life when I’m not really in a condition to withstand it all. But here we are.”
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 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 Briton 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 on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes.
Mr Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.
