Chemistry Nobel laureate wants humanity to focus on mining ‘invisible gold’ all around us
By 
Patrick Walter2026-07-28T13:30:00
Susumu Kitagawa says that his vision is that one day porous materials will allow us to tap air for raw materials
Humanity needs new materials to help it move away from a ‘digging civilisation’ to a ‘separating civilisation’. That’s the big idea of Susumu Kitagawa at Kyoto University, one of last year’s winners of the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), who says that we need to focus on ‘mining’ the ‘invisible gold’ all around us – air.
Kitagawa won the 2025 chemistry Nobel prize alongside Omar Yaghi and Richard Robson for the creation and development of porous coordination polymers that include MOFs. Kitagawa’s personal contribution, which won him a third of the 2025 chemistry prize, was developing stable MOFs. He then went one step further, developing a third generation of MOFs that were much less rigid than those that preceded them.