International Nobel Prize in Chemistry for three materials scientists
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to the materials scientists Susumu Kitagawa (Japan), Richard Robson (Australia) and Omar Yaghi (USA) for the development of organometallic framework compounds. This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
08.10.2025, 13:00
08.10.2025, 13:01
SDA
The researchers have created molecular structures with large cavities through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These structures - metal-organic framework compounds - can therefore be used to extract water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.
"Metal-organic framework compounds have enormous potential and open up previously unimagined possibilities for tailor-made materials with new functions," explained Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. The researchers' findings could be applied, for example, to the separation of harmful chemicals such as PFAS from water and the degradation of pharmaceutical traces in the environment.
Kitagawa was born in Kyoto in 1951, where he still works today. Omar Yaghi, 60, comes from Jordan and is a researcher at the University of California. Robson, who works in Melbourne, is 88 years old.
Highly endowed prize
This year's most prestigious award for chemists is endowed with a total of eleven million crowns (around one million euros). The award goes equally to the researchers.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to 195 different researchers. Two of them have received it twice. Eight of the prizewinners to date have been women: for example Marie Curie in 1911, who discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium, and the researchers Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, who received the prize in 2020 for the development of gene scissors.
Half of last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to David Baker (USA), the other half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work in the UK. Baker received the prize for computer-aided protein design, while Hassabis and Jumper received it for predicting the complex structures of proteins.
This year's Nobel Prize announcements started with medicine: This year's award goes to Shimon Sakaguchi (Japan), Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell (both USA). According to the Nobel Committee, their findings on the immune system provided the basis for the development of possible new treatment methods for cancer and autoimmune diseases, for example.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday to the quantum researchers John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, who work in the USA. They had shown that even macroscopic, millimeter-sized structures behave according to the rules of quantum theory, thus laying the foundation for the next generation of quantum computers.
This year's Nobel Prize winners for Literature and Peace will be announced on Thursday and Friday. The series ends next Monday with the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics, donated by the Swedish Riksbank.
The awards ceremony traditionally takes place on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the prize's founder Alfred Nobel. This year's winners of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize, were announced in Stockholm on October 1.
