Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
The article gives a good simplified explanation, here is my shorter explanation: porous materials, like sponges, have a lot of surface area, which is useful for two main reasons: 1) speeding up reaction rates and 2) capturing and releasing molecules (water, CO2, pollutants, etc.) More surface area is more valuable. Before, the most surface area we had was with zeolites, which are aluminosilicate minerals which occur naturally and are also synthetically produced - the synthetics mostly produced by trial and error. MOFs are unique in a few ways; for one, they are rationally designed molecules where we can predict some properties, and two, the surface area is far higher than zeolites. Zeolites range from 10-1700 m2/gram based on how you measure (most are from 20-400) and MOFs range from 1000-7000+.
Unfortunately MOFs are still quite expensive and very much on the cutting edge, so I am forced to use zeolites anytime I want a lot of surface area, but they are getting more accessible (you can now buy them on Amazon!) and I imagine the price will come down for some of the simpler to make MOFs in the near future.
Some fifteen years ago, as an intern working for a company making desulfurization catalysts (stuff that removes nasty sulfur compounds from crude oil so they don't stink up the gas you put in your car), I prepared a few of the easy-to-handle air stable ones.
Reactions between fluids and a solid catalyst take place on the catalyst surface, so higher surface area = higher reaction rates = better.
I remember everyone's minds at the company being completely blown by the ridiculous surface areas of my attempts at recreating some random MOFs from literature. Got awarded the highest possible grade for no reason other than (badly) following a few procedures and measuring that indeed, their internal surface area was insanely big.
Thanks Yaghi and co. I'll always fondly remember your MOFs.
It's totally OK to experiment with these things, but wouldn't you then have to worry about these application areas being patented and having to enter into costly licensing deals if you wanted to use them in industry?
New tech and specific applications can be covered for commercialization, but the general "idea" of using MOFs for adsorption is broad enough that you'd probably only get into legal hot water if you tried to introduce a direct competitor to someone in the market.
The resulting blue crunchy mess is NOWHERE near something on a support material that you throw into a fluidized bed reactor for reaction at elevated temperature for months on end. And that's where the proprietary magic happens.
And me, I've been here the whole time!
> When the workshop returned the wooden balls, he tested building some molecules. This was when he had a moment of insight: there was a vast amount of information baked into the holes’ positioning. The model molecules automatically had the correct form and structure, because of where the holes were situated. This insight led to his next idea: what would happen if he utilised the atoms’ inherent properties to link together different types of molecules, rather than individual atoms? Could he design new types of molecular constructions?
He was in a cafeteria, someone slipped, and accidentally threw a plate into the air. Feynman could see it spinning, and could see that it had a wobble that spun, and wondered if he could figure out the ratio between the two.
The piece of mathematics that he worked out had no particular purpose. But having it turned out to be essential later in the work that earned him a Nobel prize.
Never underestimate the value of play!
I don't. It's my boss who doesn't see the value :(
1. In the phrase "metal–organic": that's not a hyphen in the text.
2. What's with the dropped apostrophe: "the ions and molecules inherent attraction to each other mattered"
Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to comment on such things, but they're distracting in otherwise good copy.
2. No excuse for this.
(Wikipedia gives examples like “Boston–Hartford route” and “Bose–Einstein statistics”. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=131217... )
According to the referenced legend, the carpenter Lu Ban excels at building intricate but useful wooden structures (~ MOFs). Ntheless this striving after usefulness impedes his craft- he will not be able to attain the immortality he ultimately seeks. Zhuangzi muses that Lu Ban fails to appreciate the "usefulness of the useless"
(Zz turns out wrong-- Lu Ban was later deified by craftsmen)
So you're discounting living organisms themselves?
> A couple of grams of MOF-5 holds an area as big as a football pitch
grams are of course a measure of mass, and a football pitch is presumably a measure of 2d space. Does anyone have any idea how these relate? I can imagine some heavily modified form of this making sense, such as: a couple of grams of MOF-5 is able to contain the amount of gas that would fill a standard football stadium at 1 atmosphere of pressure, but that amount of mangling seems unreasonable.
- Harvesting water from air anywhere, including the desert, would be incredibly useful. Maybe we can make the air too dry somehow, but that should be manageable.
- I expect the world will solve the CO₂ global warming situation by sequestering the excess CO₂ underground. We know how to sequester gas from the natural gas industry. We just need a way to grab pure CO₂ from the atmosphere. MOFs look like they'll be the best way to do that!
You really understate the absolutely massive amount of resources it would take to actually do this.
Of course, to solve the biggest problem on the planet, absolutely massive amounts of resources may be the right size investment.
The way I imagine this to work is that a future MOF material spontaneously accumulates CO₂ molecules from the atmosphere. When it's "full" the CO₂ is extracted (this may be the hard part), and pumped underground (this is mature tech).
If you can go through this cycle without destroying the MOF, it seems pretty sustainable to me.
Could this lead to better dehumidifiers?
I looked around, and commercial products are starting to appear, but so far the prices have a few too many zeros for home use: https://airjouletech.com/industry/moisture-control/
Bit of a disappointing prize, but hey, at least it went to chemists this year!
This therapy could take something like 1-2 hours and could potentially be a drastically more efficient way to administer drugs, because they will primarily affect the target organ/region rather than be necessarily dispersed throughout the whole body, which would result in better intervention outcomes, and less side-effects.
The shape of the demand is the tricky bit. They're not like many other emerging technologies; they are a whole class of materials with wildly different properties, each of which you can produce in several forms; and production is wildly different depending on the type. If there is demand for X tons/yr, spread across 10 industries, but 90% of that demand is in one industry that requires properties of XYZ, then you need to produce the right MOFs in the right form.
The issue, in my mind, is that a lot of this stuff sort of requires a very large vertically integrated company or government project to kickstart it. You can't go out as a company and say "we want to buy X tons of MIL-53(Sc)" [0], nobody would sell it to you. You also can't go out as a producer and start making X tons of MIL-53(Sc) either. The ideal would be that you are, say, TSMC and it would enhance one of your processes, so you make a few kg in house, you use most of it, you sell the rest, and kickstart an industry in that way.
From my perspective - which, again, take with a heap of salt - I think that academia could do their part by "advertising" the most promising candidates better. The list of MOFs is long and many are not usable or stable in real world conditions. Take some of the more promising candidates out of the lab and do some demos with industry. Put together some videos. Write up some honest reports toward an engineer's point of view. That would provide a real boost towards real-world applications.
[0] I just picked MIL-53(Sc) because it's funny, obviously nobody in the real world is going to use scandium in a production product.
Right now the main issue is that there aren't even really great, cheap ways to mass produce them. Almost everything that's been performed on MOFs has been at the laboratory scale, and there's not necessarily a clear path to scale up. And there are fundamental cost-to-effect ratio issues that can't necessarily be easily overcome.
It’s a prize given to scientists to highlight and encourage valuable research according to a jury of pairs.
This MoF thing is quite damn cool though, advancing moisture capturing in arid regions itself is big.
But also being able to separate chemicals in a more controlled manner sounds like something really groundbreaking that will probably impact chemistry for a long time to come.
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Fairview-Microwave/FMMT...
If water capture in arid environments actually scales with this method, then that's far more directly exposed to people.
That being said, you get stuff like high Tc superconductors that are awarded the following year: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1987/press-release...