Crystals built with room inside

In plain terms

1974

Building wooden models of molecules for his students, Robson has the idea. He does nothing with it for the best part of ten years.

1989

Robson and his colleague Bernard Hoskins publish a spacious, diamond-like crystal of copper ions and four-armed molecules.

1992–2003

Kitagawa shows that gases can flow in and out of such frameworks and predicts flexible ones. Yaghi coins the name “metal–organic framework”, makes the very stable MOF-5 and shows that frameworks can be designed in whole families.

2017–2023

Yaghi’s group tests water harvesters running only on sunlight, first in an Arizona back garden, later in Berkeley and Death Valley. The 2023 device collected up to about a cup of water a day for each kilogram of framework.

2025

The prize. Yaghi got the call just after his flight landed: “There is nothing like this, it’s an astonishment.”

2026

Industry is putting the materials to work, but most uses are still being built. Yaghi’s company Atoco plans its first commercial water harvesters. A carbon-capture plant using a framework made by BASF is expected at a Texas refinery by 2028.

Say it accurately

“Scientists can now make water out of thin air.”

The water is already in the air as vapour. The framework soaks it up at night, and the sun’s warmth drives it out in the morning. That works even in very dry air, which is the achievement. The amounts so far are small: the hand-held harvester tested in Berkeley and Death Valley gave up to 285 grams of water per kilogram of material in a day, about a cup. Larger machines are planned, not yet in common use.

“He invented it because he grew up without water.”

Yaghi did grow up without running water. As a boy his job was to fill every container he could when the city supply came, once a week or once a fortnight, for a few hours. But he says plainly that this did not motivate his science: “I was more motivated by the beauty of molecules.” What his childhood did, he thinks, is let him see in his students’ data in 2014 what others had missed, that one material could harvest water in the desert.

“A few grams can hold a football pitch.”

It is the inner surface that is that large, not the space. The walls of the cavities in a couple of grams of MOF-5, laid out flat, would cover an area about the size of a football pitch. Gas molecules cling to that surface, which is why so much can be packed in.

“MOFs will solve climate change.”

The committee says some of these materials “may contribute” to great challenges, and that so far most have been used only on a small scale. Real commercial uses exist, such as holding the toxic gases used to make computer chips. Carbon capture with these materials is being tested in a factory in Canada and planned for a Texas refinery. It is not yet happening at the scale of the problem.

“Three people created this new kind of matter.”

Crystals with spaces inside were known long before, among them the pigment Prussian blue from the eighteenth century, and the committee’s background paper cites many other groups who built such networks in the 1990s. Robson’s 1989 papers were written with Bernard Hoskins, a crystallographer who died in 2002. The prize honours the three who made the field predictable and showed what it could do.

For preaching

• “He did all the real science” Instance

  Ecclesiastes 4:9–10 · Philippians 1:3–5

  Asked in Stockholm about collaborations, Robson spoke of Bernard Hoskins, his friend and colleague for nearly forty years, who did not live to see the prize. “He did all the real science,” Robson said, and called his own part “handwaving”. They had lunch together day after day, and without that, he said, the work would not have come to the stage that it did. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor” (Ecclesiastes 4:9, WEB).

• “Go to the bank and get it” Instance

  2 Corinthians 12:14 · Proverbs 22:6

  When Yaghi was in ninth grade his father told him he was going to America. At the embassy he was told to come back with a cheque for $9,000, which was about all the family had saved. He went to the butcher’s shop to tell his father, who said, without hesitation, “Okay, go to the bank and get it.” Paul states the ordinary rule of a household: “the children ought not to save up for the parents, but the parents for the children” (2 Corinthians 12:14, WEB). Here it is kept, in full.

• A house built for guests Likeness

  Ephesians 2:19–22 · 1 Peter 2:4–5 · Romans 15:7

  The committee describes metal ions as “cornerstones” and the framework as rooms for chemistry. It is a building made mostly of open space, and the spaces are shaped for what they are meant to receive. That is a picture of a church built as a dwelling, with room made for others. The image proves nothing, and it fails at an important point: a framework is designed to admit one kind of molecule and shut out the rest. The welcome of Romans 15:7 is the opposite.

• Water in a dry land Likeness

  Isaiah 41:17–20 · Isaiah 43:19–20 · John 4:13–14

  “The poor and needy seek water, and there is none. Their tongue fails for thirst” (Isaiah 41:17, WEB). A material that draws drinking water out of desert air is a vivid picture of the promise that follows. Use it as a picture only. Isaiah says the point is that people should know “Yahweh’s hand has done this” (41:20, WEB), and a chemist’s machine is not that. Nor is the promise being kept by technology: the devices are still small and mostly planned.

On the Wesleyan shelf

• God’s Approbation of His Works (sermon on Genesis 1:31)

  Wesley begins with a duty: “it is our duty to contemplate what he has wrought, and to understand as much of it as we are able” (Introduction, §2). He then pictures the world as first made, where “No soil was burned up by the solar heat” (§I.6) and the atmosphere was “replete with earthly particles of various kinds, and with huge volumes of water, sometimes invisible, sometimes visible” (§I.8). His physics of “ethereal fire” is long gone. His observation that the air carries unseen water is the very fact the water harvesters use.

• The New Creation (sermon on Revelation 21:5)

  Of water when all things are made new, Wesley writes: “It will be, in every part of the world, clear and limpid; pure from all unpleasing or unhealthful mixtures” (§12). Frameworks that pull PFAS and traces of antibiotics out of water belong to the present age, not that one. A preacher can set them side by side as a foretaste of what is hoped for, so long as the hope stays God’s work, not industry’s.

• The Good Steward (sermon on Luke 16:2)

  Among the talents God lends, Wesley lists “learning and knowledge, in their various degrees, with all the other advantages of education” (§I.8), and at the judgement each is asked how he used “whatever share of learning, whatever knowledge of things or men, was committed thee” (§III.6). Yaghi says something similar without the theology: he set out to make beautiful things, then felt “obligated as a scholar” to ask what they were good for, because “Society pays for our research.”