Born into a family of Palestinian refugees in Jordan with little schooling, Nobel chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi on Wednesday (October 8, 2025) paid tribute to science’s “equalising force”.

Prof. Yaghi, a Jordanian-American, won the 2025 prize together with Susumu Kitagawa of Japan and U.K.-born Richard Robson for their groundbreaking discoveries on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), whose uses include capturing carbon dioxide and harvesting water from desert air.

“I grew up in a very humble home. We were a dozen of us in one small room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to raise,” he told the Nobel Foundation in an interview after learning he had won the prestigious prize.

Their home had no electricity or running water. His father had only finished sixth grade and his mother could neither read nor write.

Born in 1965, he spent his childhood in Amman, in Jordan, before leaving for the United States at the age of 15, on the advice of his stern father.

Prof. Yaghi first discovered molecular structures in a book when he was 10 years old, after sneaking into the usually locked school library.

His eyes were drawn to the “unintelligible but captivating” images.

“It’s quite a journey,” he mused — and one that science enabled him to make, he said.

“Science is the greatest equalising force in the world,” Prof. Yaghi said.

“Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That’s why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity.”

His research group succeeded in extracting water from desert air in Arizona.

“I started at Arizona State University, my independent career and my dream was to publish at least one paper that receives 100 citations,” he recalled.

“Now my students say that our group has garnered over 250,000 citations.”

“The beauty of chemistry is that if you learn how to control matter on the atomic and molecular level, well, the potential is great,” he said.

“We opened a gold mine in that way and the field grew,” he said.

The story so far: For centuries, chemistry’s main terrain was to craft ever more complex molecules but it soon became clear to scientists that they were all confined to their own boundaries. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 honours three scientists who expanded that horizon into a whole new dimension. Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi have been feted for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), little molecular scaffolds with vast internal spaces where other atoms and molecules can move, react or stay.

What is a MOF?

MOFs are crystalline structures in which metal ions serve as nodes and organic molecules as connectors. The resulting structure can have enormous internal surface areas — thousands of square metres per gram — and their pores can be customised to attract or hold specific molecules.

Chemists classify MOFs as part of a larger family called coordination networks but their hallmark is tuneable porosity. By carefully choosing the building blocks, researchers can control the size and shape of the cavities and the chemical environment within. As a result, MOFs are among the most versatile materials ever created.

What did Robson and Kitagawa do?

In the 1970s, Richard Robson at the University of Melbourne was preparing ball-and-stick models to show students how atoms connect. He realised that the positions of the holes drilled into each atom contained all the information needed to determine the molecule’s shape. If that logic worked for small molecules, he wondered, could it be scaled up?

A decade later, Robson combined copper ions, which like to bond in a tetrahedral arrangement, with an organic molecule bearing four arms ending in nitrile groups. To everyone’s surprise, instead of a messy tangle, the components self-assembled into a diamond-like crystal. This lattice wasn’t dense like diamond but full of empty cavities, each capable of hosting other molecules. Robson predicted that such “frameworks” could be tailored to trap ions, catalyse reactions and sieve molecules by size.

However, Robson’s early crystals were fragile. Susumu Kitagawa in Japan made them stable and functional. Guided by his philosophy of finding “usefulness in the useless”, Kitagawa pursued porous materials even when they seemed too delicate to matter. In 1997, he used cobalt, nickel or zinc ions linked by a bridging molecule called 4,4’-bipyridine to build a true three-dimensional MOF. When the material was dried and refilled, gases such as methane, nitrogen, and oxygen could flow in and out without damaging the structure.

Kitagawa also recognised that MOFs could be soft rather than rigid, with flexible molecular joints allowing them to expand, contract or bend around depending on temperature, pressure, and the molecules inside.

What was Yaghi’s contribution?

Omar Yaghi in the U.S. gave MOFs their structural strength and reproducibility. Having grown up in modest circumstances in Jordan, Yaghi was fascinated by chemistry’s ability to create new forms of order. At Arizona State University in the 1990s, he sought a way to build extended materials by design, not by chance, using metal ions as joints and organic molecules as struts.

In 1995, he made the first two-dimensional frameworks linked by cobalt or copper ions that could host other molecules without collapsing. Four years later, he achieved a landmark with MOF-5, a robust three-dimensional lattice made from zinc ions and benzene-dicarboxylate linkers. MOF-5 was strong and, notably, just a few grams had an internal surface area comparable to a football field. It was also intact when heated to 300°C and emptied of all ‘guest’ molecules.

By the early 2000s, his team had built entire families of MOFs with the same underlying geometry but different pore sizes and functions.

Why do MOFs matter?

Say you have a tennis ball with a surface area of X. Say its outer shell is 5 mm thick. What will the total surface area be when you cut open the ball? It will be 2.2-times X (proof available on request) — which is a little illustration of the ‘magic’ of surface areas. The same ball yielded some surface area first, then with a single modification that didn’t add any new material yielded 2.2X! This fact explains one half of the allure of MOFs. The other half has to do with how easily chemists can make them for different applications.

A MOF called CALF-20 can efficiently capture carbon dioxide from factory exhaust and is already being tested in industrial plants. MOF-303 can harvest drinking water from arid desert air by absorbing vapour at night and releasing it in sunlight. UiO-67 can remove persistent forever chemicals (PFAS) from water. MIL-101 and ZIF-8 can speed up the breakdown of pollutants and recover rare-earth metals from wastewater.

In the energy sector, NU-1501 and MOF-177 can store hydrogen or methane safely at moderate pressure, a crucial step toward clean-fuel vehicles. Others serve as containers for toxic gases in semiconductor manufacturing and as drug-delivery capsules that release medicines in response to biological cues.