Chemistry Nobel goes to trio for metal–organic frameworks innovation

Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in the development of metal–organic frameworks. Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the chemistry prize in Stockholm on Wednesday. It was the third prize announced this week. The literature prize will come on Thursday, followed by the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics prize on Monday. The award ceremony will be held Dec 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. There have been 116 chemistry prizes given to 195 individuals between 1901 and 2024. The 2024 prize was awarded to David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.

The three were awarded for discovering powerful techniques to decode and even design novel proteins, the building blocks of life. Their work used advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs and other materials are made. The first Nobel of 2025 was announced Monday. The prize in medicine went to Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Tuesday's physics prize went to John Clarke, Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis for their research on the weird world of subatomic quantum tunnelling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.