Chemistry that works like Hermione’s magic handbag wins a 2025 chemistry Nobel

The development of spacious molecular structures has earned three scientists the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Gaps in the structures, called metal-organic frameworks, make it possible to store gases and other chemicals, sometimes in vast quantities. The structures are kind of like Hermione’s charmed handbag in the Harry Potter series, said Nobel Committee for Chemistry member Olof Ramström during the Oct. 8 announcement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “Small on the outside,” he said, “but very, very large on the inside.”

The variety of metal-organic frameworks scientists can concoct are seemingly endless; so are their applications. Such structures can collect water from air, conjuring potable liquid in the desert. They can capture greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide expelled from industrial plants. They can extract forever chemicals known as PFAS from water and recover rare earth elements from waste, Ramström said. “The list goes on and on and on.”

This year’s award “highlights chemistry’s greatest strength: the ability to design and build molecular structures that address global challenges,” American Chemical Society president Dorothy Phillips said in a statement.

In the late 1980s, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne in Australia figured out that combining copper ions with organic, or carbon-based, compounds created a crystalline molecular structure similar to that of a diamond. But whereas diamond molecules pack densely together, Robson’s structure was full of holes. Such holes turned out to be useful. 

Robson shares the 11 million Swedish kronor prize (more than $1.1 million) with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University in Japan and Omar Yaghi of the University of California, Berkeley.

A few years after Robson’s discovery, Kitagawa began creating new metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, and eventually reported one that could take up gases like methane, nitrogen and oxygen. Around the same time, Yaghi was also experimenting with combining metal ions and organic molecules. In 1999, he created a highly stable framework, called MOF-5, with an enormous amount of surface area. Just a few grams of the material, about the amount in a sugar cube, contained as much surface area as a soccer field — thousands of square meters. Such a material could be used to sponge up large amounts of gas, Ramström said.

Yaghi first heard about his win at the airport. While collecting his luggage, his phone buzzed. The call was from Sweden. “It was absolutely thrilling,” he said in a news conference. His phone hasn’t stopped ringing since, he said. 

Yaghi, whose parents were Palestinian refugees, came to the United States from Jordan as a teenager. He credits the U.S. public school system for his success. It “takes people like me with a major disadvantaged background, a refugee background, and allows you to work, and work hard and distinguish yourself.”