At the height of the demand for housing, the award Nobel award in Chemistry 2025 has gone to three chemists who have built molecular housings thanks to their ingenuity, tenacity, patience and partnership.

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi have been awarded for the development of a new subject of molecular architecture. The Structures obtained are based on the combination of metals and organic molecules creating metal-organic scaffolds (MOF) with large interior cavities to house different molecules. The architecture of these constructions is reminiscent of the sculptures of Chillida and Oteiza, since the value lies in creating and sculpting the void.

These molecular constructions are as interesting as the process followed to arrive at them.

Robson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, got his inspiration by preparing a class for his students. He wanted them to build molecules by simulating the atoms with wooden balls and the bonds with rods. So, when he thought about where to pierce the balls to link them, he imagined a larger construction by joining molecules with the appropriate bonds. In this way, he combined molecules to form, like Lego models, regular Structures with cavities to house other molecules.

For his part, Kitagawa read an ancient Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi, who questioned what we believe to be useful. He argued that what is valuable may not bring immediate benefit. Unfortunately, while he did his research in that spirit, those who were to subsidize his research did not think so. In any case, he managed to obtain very stable, soft, flexible and malleable three-dimensional metal-organic Structures .

Finally, Yaghi introduced the world to MOF-5, which comprised a surface area of a soccer field in two grams. Thus, it could capture molecules by changing their shape and releasing them back to their original form as if it were a lung.

The teams of these three researchers laid the instructions for synthesizing thousands of metal-organic Structures in laboratories around the world with different properties.

For example, they have been designed to capture water from desert air and make it available by heating the MOF, to extract pollutants from water, to capture carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, to store hydrogen, to administer pharmaceuticals or to trap ethylene gas from fruits and delay their ripening. Once these Structures have been proposed, their possibilities are enormous for the benefit of humanity, to the point that they are being referred to as the material of the 21st century.

The result of the cooperation of researchers from different parts of the world, the combination of organic and inorganic material and the union of knowledge (philosophical, architectural, educational or chemical) leads to the creation of spaces where everyone fits. A great scientific and human learning.