In today’s Finshots, we tell you why Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But here’s a quick sidenote before we begin. Insurance just got cheaper.

Since the government removed the 18% GST on insurance premiums, life and health policies now cost less. But cheaper does not always mean simpler.

That’s why we’re conducting a 2-day Insurance Masterclass, where we’ll help you understand what to buy, how much cover you need, and how to avoid common mistakes.

Only 300 seats remaining.

👉🏽 Click here to save your spot.

Now, on to today’s story.

The Story

You’re probably wondering why Finshots, a newsletter that usually dives into economics, business, and finance, has suddenly decided to talk about science today.

Fair question. And no, we haven’t switched genres. But we couldn’t ignore this one. Because 2025’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry isn’t just another science headline. It’s a discovery that could actually help us fight climate change.

And if you’ve been reading Finshots for a while, you already know how much we occasionally love talking about climate change. And since we haven’t written about it in a long long time, we figured this was the perfect story to make a comeback.

So this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three brilliant scientists — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi, for developing something called metal-organic frameworks or MOFs.

Now, if you’re wondering what on earth that means, think of MOFs as tiny molecular structures with big empty spaces inside them, like a sponge at the atomic level, where gases and other chemicals can move through freely. Their discoveries might sound complex, but they mark a massive leap in chemistry. Because for decades, scientists thought that creating such intricate molecular frameworks was nearly impossible.

For context, chemists have long been good at making individual molecules, or what are called zero-dimensional (0D) structures.

And if that’s too complex to understand, here’s a quick chemistry basics lesson. You see, a molecular structure is basically the arrangement of atoms in a molecule — how they’re connected and how they sit in space. Think of a molecule as a small construction made of balls and sticks. The balls are the atoms like carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen. And the sticks are the chemical bonds that connect those atoms.

For example, a water molecule (H₂O) has one oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms, arranged in a V-shape. And a carbon dioxide molecule (CO₂) has one carbon atom in the middle and two oxygens on opposite sides in a straight-line structure.

These molecular structures are super important in chemistry because the shape and arrangement of atoms decide what the molecule can do. Like how it reacts, what it smells like, whether it’s solid or liquid, and so on.

Now, coming back to 0D structures, these are single compounds that don’t extend in any direction, like a single molecule of water or methane. And scientists had figured out how to design almost any molecule they wanted by combining atoms, just like Lego blocks, to make medicines, plastics, or dyes.

But when it came to making bigger, repeating structures that extended in two or three dimensions — say, forming a flat surface like a sheet of paper or a 3D structure like a crystal or solid block, things got tricky. Sure, scientists could make them, but they couldn’t really control how they formed. Even predicting what these structures would look like was a nightmare. You could know exactly what elements were in a compound, but not how those atoms would arrange themselves into a crystal. So, even understanding how simple crystals like salt or quartz would form wasn’t easy.

Another seemingly impossible task back then was to make porous materials or solids with tiny holes or spaces inside, that could trap or hold smaller molecules, like gases. This would be incredibly useful for filtering materials or storing gases. Scientists already knew that naturally porous minerals called ‘zeolites’ could trap small molecules and were used in detergents, fuel refining, and gas separation. So, if chemists could design similar materials from scratch, it would be a huge breakthrough.

But to make such materials, you’d need to design a 3D structure that’s not only well-organised but also has large, stable cavities similar to a sponge but at the molecular level — one that could hold small molecules. But like we mentioned earlier, that was something scientists couldn’t wrap their heads around for the longest time.

There were old examples that hinted such materials could exist. One was Prussian blue, a blue pigment that’s been around since the 18th century. At the time, no one knew its structure. But later, scientists realised that it had a repeating 3D framework, similar to today’s MOFs. What made it special was that it had tiny empty spaces inside that could hold small things like water molecules.

This was a big clue for chemists. It showed that materials with tiny holes, called porous materials, could exist naturally. And that got them thinking. “If nature could make something like this by chance, maybe we could design similar materials on purpose?” Ones that could be customised to hold specific molecules inside them.

And so entered the heroes of our story — this year’s Chemistry Nobel Laureates.

Let’s start with Richard Robson. 

Back in 1974, Robson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, was helping his students build molecular models using wooden balls for atoms and sticks for bonds. Each ball had holes drilled into it, showing how atoms connect in specific ways. While using these models, Robson realised that the position of the holes carried all the information about how molecules form and fit together.

That made him wonder, “What if I could use the natural bonding habits of atoms to design entirely new structures?”

A decade later, he put that idea to the test. And to his surprise, the materials he created organised themselves into perfect, repeating 3D frameworks, just like crystals, but with lots of empty spaces inside. These spaces could trap and hold other molecules — something no one had done before.

Soon after, Susumu Kitagawa and Omar Yaghi took this idea further. Kitagawa made frameworks that could hold small gas molecules, like methane or oxygen, or even “breathe” by expanding and contracting as gases entered and left. Yaghi made a structure called MOF-5, which had an enormous internal surface area — about ten times larger than most materials. Imagine one gram of material with as much surface as a football field inside it! Yup, that’s a lot like Hermione Granger’s handbag in the Harry Potter novels. It could store large amounts of gases, filter molecules, and stay stable even under harsh conditions.

From there, the field exploded. Scientists all over the world began designing hundreds of new MOFs. They built ones that could store hydrogen for clean energy, capture carbon dioxide to fight climate change or separate rare-earth materials from wastewater. Some could remove toxic forever chemicals from water or store drugs for slow, targeted release in the body. 

Yaghi’s team even managed to pull water out of desert air in Arizona. At night, their special MOF material soaked up tiny amounts of water vapour from the air. During the day, the material warmed up and released the water, which they could then collect and use.

But it’s not just scientists in university labs who are experimenting with MOFs anymore. Big corporations and ambitious start-ups have jumped in too, racing to turn this scientific wonder into commercial reality.

They’re working on scaling up production and cutting costs so that MOFs can be made in bulk — cheaper, faster, and without losing quality. And here’s another good thing. MOFs can be recycled. You can literally clean out their tiny pores and reuse them again, making them both eco-friendly and economically smart.

And if you look at it from the economic lens, the global MOF market is already worth around $840 million and is expected to triple in the next decade. That’s a big deal, not just for the economy but for the environment too.

Even India’s oil and gas sector is showing interest, using MOFs for energy storage and separation.

But there’s another reason MOFs could matter deeply to India. The country has pledged to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030. It’s part of the goal to achieve what’s called Land Degradation Neutrality.

Again, for context, drylands are regions where there isn’t enough rainfall to balance out how much water evaporates. When these already dry areas begin to lose fertility and vegetation, it leads to desertification. Across the world, drylands are being degraded due to over-farming, overgrazing, deforestation, poor irrigation, and rising temperatures.

And in India, the problem is particularly severe. Much of the country’s drylands face low rainfall, frequent droughts, and scorching heatwaves. In fact, over half of India’s crop area falls under dryland farming. So, the idea of using MOFs to pull water straight out of dry desert air isn’t just fascinating. It could be transformative.

Sure, the MOF space is still evolving. But without the work of these three Nobel Laureates, we might never have imagined ideas like these in the first place.

Kitagawa, in particular, believed in something beautifully simple: to find “the usefulness of useless”. As a student, he was inspired by Nobel laureate Hideki Yukawa, who once quoted the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi: We must question what we believe to be useful. Even if something does not bring immediate benefit, it may still turn out to be valuable.

And that’s exactly what happened. Kitagawa, Robson, and Yaghi turned what once seemed impossible, into something that might just help save the planet.

Until next time…

If this story helped you understand both the science and economics of MOFs, help your friends, family, or even strangers understand it too by sharing it on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, or X. And ask them to subscribe. Plis.