Nobel Prize–winning chemist Omar Yaghi believes the materials he helped invent could reshape civilisation itself, much as stone, bronze, and silicon once did, ushering in what he sees as a new materials age, according to a profile published by New Scientist.
Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, a class of crystalline materials first developed in the 1990s. These materials, along with their close relatives known as covalent organic frameworks, are defined by extreme porosity at the molecular level, giving them internal surface areas vastly larger than their external size.
The breakthrough moment came in 1999, when Yaghi and his colleagues synthesized MOF-5, a zinc-based material so densely packed with pores that just a few grams contained an internal surface area comparable to a football field. This property allowed molecules to be trapped, stored, or filtered in ways previously thought impractical.
Over the following decades, Yaghi helped establish the field of reticular chemistry, focused on designing frameworks atom by atom to achieve specific functions. That precision has enabled MOFs to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, extract drinking water from dry desert atmospheres, and selectively capture chemicals with extraordinary efficiency.
Yaghi argues that these capabilities address some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity, including climate change, water scarcity, and clean energy storage. Unlike many advanced materials, MOFs can often be synthesized at relatively low temperatures and tailored for large-scale deployment, making them suitable for real-world infrastructure rather than just laboratory experiments.
In his view, civilisation has always been shaped by the dominant materials it learns to control. Just as silicon defined the digital era, Yaghi believes reticular materials could underpin the next technological age, one built around sustainability, molecular precision, and direct control over matter at the smallest scales.
While the full impact of MOFs is still unfolding, Yaghi is confident that their combination of versatility, scalability, and environmental relevance places them among the most consequential material inventions of the modern era.
