Swedish king awards US-Saudi sci­ent­ist Nobel Prize in Chem­istry

In 2015, Omar Yaghi received King Faisal Inter­na­tional Prize

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden has awar­ded Amer­ican Saudi sci­ent­ist Omar Yaghi the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry for his break­through devel­op­ment of met­al­or­ganic frame­works, a sponge-like struc­ture that could store CO2 or har­vest water from the air, along­side the Brit­ish Aus­tralian and Japan­ese sci­ent­ists Richard Rob­son and Susumu Kit­agawa.

Yaghi, Rob­son and Kit­agawa have each con­trib­uted over the past 50 years to devel­op­ing scal­able, reli­able MOF mod­els that can be deployed in industry to address cli­mate-related issues and deliver clean air and water. They will share the $1.2 mil­lion prize.

Yaghi, 60, who grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan to a Palestinian fam­ily expelled from their prop­erty by Zion­ist mili­tias in 1948, is the second Arab-born laur­eate to be awar­ded the Nobel Prize in Chem­istry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sci­ences. The Nobel Found­a­tion said that MOFs, which are struc­tures with large internal spaces, “can be used to har­vest water from desert air, cap­ture car­bon diox­ide, store toxic gases or cata­lyze chem­ical reac­tions.”

In 2015, Yaghi received the King Faisal Inter­na­tional Prize for Chem­istry, and in 2021, King Sal­man gran­ted him Saudi cit­izen­ship for his sci­entific achieve­ments. He holds the James and Neeltje Tret­ter Chair in Chem­istry at UC Berke­ley and is the found­ing dir­ector of the Berke­ley Global Sci­ence Insti­tute. In addi­tion, Yaghi has branched into entre­pren­eur­ial activ­ity since 2018, found­ing Atoco, which works on water har­vest­ing and car­bon cap­ture, and co-found­ing H2MOF for hydro­gen stor­age and WaHa Inc. for water har­vest­ing with projects in the Middle East. His focus on har­vest­ing water from the air in arid con­di­tions stems from his upbring­ing in Jordan, where water reached homes every 14 days. He began field tests in the Ari­zona desert in the 1990s to cap­ture water from the air using the MOF-303 model he had developed.

Yaghi is the first Saudi national to be awar­ded the Nobel Prize and the second Arab-born to win in the chem­istry cat­egory since the Egyp­tian Amer­ican chem­ist and sci­ent­ist Ahmed Zewail was honored in 1999.

Zewail’s model of the “femto­chem­istry appar­atus” is on dis­play at the Nobel Prize Museum. He used the appar­atus to demon­strate the prin­ciple behind his method of study­ing chem­ical reac­tions using laser tech­no­logy, cap­tur­ing it in a femto­second, which is to a second what a second is to 32 mil­lion years.

He is one of dozens of laur­eates who donated objects to the museum since its found­a­tion in 2001 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, which began in 1901, five years after the death of the Swedish chem­ist

Alfred Nobel. Since 2001, it has become tra­di­tion that each Decem­ber the win­ners of that year bring an item to be dis­played that reflects their work, per­sonal life or inspir­a­tion, Karl Johan, a cur­ator at the museum, told Arab News.

“Zewail wanted to donate an object that could visu­al­ize his work and his exper­i­ment. He con­struc­ted (the inter­act­ive appar­atus) spe­cific­ally for the museum. As one of the first objects to be dis­played after 2001, it got lots of atten­tion,” Johan said. The award cere­mony in the Swedish cap­ital is the latest event to wrap up Nobel Week, which, since Fri­day, has fea­tured Nobel laur­eates in the fields of lit­er­at­ure, chem­istry, phys­ics, medi­cine and eco­nomic sci­ences enga­ging in pub­lic events.