Japan’s Susumu Kitagawa was one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their role developing metal-organic frameworks.
Kitagawa — the second Japanese Nobel winner this year — joined Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi in winning the award for creating “new rooms for chemistry,” said Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The chemistry prize follows the physics prize, which on Tuesday honored Briton John Clarke, Frenchman Michel Devoret and American John Martinis for work putting quantum mechanics into action — enabling the development of all kinds of digital technology.
Last year, the chemistry prize went to Americans David Baker and John Jumper, together with Briton Demis Hassabis, for work on cracking the code of the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life, through computing and artificial intelligence.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to a U.S.-Japanese trio for research into the human immune system.
Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell, of the United States, and Japan’s Shimon Sakaguchi were recognised by the Nobel jury for identifying immunological “security guards.”
The chemistry prize will be followed by the literature prize on Thursday, and the highly watched Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
The economics prize wraps up the 2025 Nobel season on Oct. 13.
The Nobel consists of a diploma, a gold medal and a $1.2 million check, to be shared if there is more than one winner in a discipline.
The laureates will receive their prizes from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
That date is the anniversary of the death in 1896 of scientist Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in his will.
Information from AFP added
