Trio wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing materials from “Hermione’s bag”

Scientists Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a new form of molecular architecture, producing materials that could help address challenges such as climate change and the lack of fresh water.

The three laureates worked to create molecular constructs with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow and which could be used to collect water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide or store toxic gases.

The academy said some of these materials have an extraordinarily large surface area — a porous material with roughly the same amount as a small sugar cube could contain as much surface area as a large football field.

“A small amount of this material can be almost like Hermione’s bag in Harry Potter. It can store large amounts of gas in a tiny volume,” said Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

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The more than century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the winners share 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million) as well as the fame of winning the world’s most prestigious scientific prize.

Kitagawa said at the Nobel press conference that he was deeply honored by the prize.

“My dream is to capture air and separate it – for example into CO2 or oxygen or water or something – and convert it into useful materials using renewable energy,” he said
Kitagawa is a professor at Kyoto University, in Japan, while Robson is a professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, and Yaghi is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

“Through the development of metal-organic frameworks, the laureates have offered chemists new opportunities to solve some of the challenges we face,” the award-giving body said in a statement.

Third Nobel Prize of 2025, Literature will be on Thursday

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was the third prize announced in this year’s harvest, maintaining tradition, following the Medicine and Physics prizes announced earlier this week.

Established by the will of Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, the awards for achievements in Science, Literature and Peace have been awarded since 1901, with some interruptions, mainly due to world wars.

Nobel himself was a chemist and his developments in that field helped sustain the wealth he accumulated from his invention of dynamite in the 19th Century. The Economics prize was added later and is financed by the Swedish central bank.

Sometimes overshadowed by more famous laureates in the fields of Physics, Literature and Peace, the Chemistry prizes still recognize many influential discoveries, such as nuclear fission, DNA sequencing techniques and yeast.

Last year’s Chemistry prize was awarded to North American scientists David Baker and John Jumper and British scientist Demis Hassabis for their work decoding the structure of proteins and creating new proteins, which has led to advances in areas such as drug development.