On the day news broke that Israel and the Palestinian armed faction Hamas had reached a first-phase agreement on the "Gaza peace initiative," a scientist of Palestinian refugee origin won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for technology that turns moisture in the air into drinking water. Memories of a childhood when a single drop of clean water was precious led to an innovation that addresses humanity's water shortage.
On the 8th, the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said, "Some of the tens of thousands of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) developed by chemists are used to solve major challenges facing humanity, such as carbon capture and water scarcity," and announced Omar M. Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in the United States, Susumu Kitagawa, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan, and Richard Robson, a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, as the winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
MOFs are materials in which metal ions and organic molecules combine to form tiny pores, essentially a kind of metal sponge. To the eye they are a small handful of powder, but inside lies space with a surface area dozens of times larger than a soccer field that selectively adsorbs or stores specific chemicals. Based on this property, they are being used to extract water from the atmosphere, capture carbon dioxide, and remove hazardous substances.
In particular, Yaghi developed MOFs that are extremely stable and whose structures can be custom-designed. He then developed a device that uses the fine structure of MOFs to turn atmospheric moisture into drinking water even in deserts with relative humidity below 10%, and pushed it to the commercialization stage. The device can operate even in environments where water is absolutely scarce, such as deserts or disaster zones, and is drawing attention as a way to secure alternative resources.
His research is also tied to personal experience. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, to a Palestinian refugee family. In an interview with a media outlet, he said, "When I was young, every drop of water was truly precious," and "On some days, I had to wake up at dawn to open the valve to get water that we could use for only a couple of hours a week."
In a phone interview with the Nobel Committee, Yaghi said he grew up in a poor home where the family shared a room with a cow they raised. Because of poverty, his parents received little education and could barely read or write. Yaghi was able to nurture his dream of becoming a scientist after immigrating to the United States at age 15.
Yaghi graduated from the State University of New York at Albany and received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then worked at the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), continuing his research at UC Berkeley. To date, he has published more than about 300 research papers, and his papers have been cited more than 250,000 times.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons said, "Yaghi's story is a quintessential American story, another American Dream," adding, "His achievements are the result of long effort, dedication and creativity."
Yaghi is the 28th Nobel laureate among UC Berkeley faculty. On the 7th, John Clarke, a professor at the university from the United Kingdom, jointly won the Nobel Prize in physics.
Emphasizing the value of foreign scientists coming to the United States, Yaghi said, "The spread of knowledge often comes from people moving across regions," and "Science allows us to talk to one another, and I don't think that can be stopped."