Celebrating the Nobel Prize: Is Unreserved Joy Enough?

The Nobel Prize, Fundamental Funding, and Environmental Issues

On October 8, 2025, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry would be awarded to three individuals, including Distinguished Professor Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University.

This award is not merely a scientific achievement; it is also a symbolic event demonstrating how science can respond to climate change, a global challenge. The 'Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs)' created by Professor Kitagawa and his colleagues are innovative materials capable of adsorbing and storing carbon dioxide, holding the potential to become a trump card for future emission reduction technologies.

What are Metal-Organic Frameworks?

First, let's take this opportunity to touch upon the research content of the award-winning Professor Kitagawa. Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are porous materials in which metal ions and organic molecules (organic ligands) bond to form a three-dimensional network structure. Their most significant feature is an extraordinarily large specific surface area (a physical quantity representing surface area per unit mass or volume); just a few grams can have a surface area equivalent to several soccer fields. It is this vast surface area that dramatically enhances their gas adsorption and storage capacity.

Professor Kitagawa and his team have been pioneers leading the research and development of MOFs since the 1990s, establishing groundbreaking MOFs that are 'highly stable,' 'capable of selecting adsorption targets,' and 'capable of having their functions altered through structural design.' For this, they are credited with introducing a new concept to materials science: the ability to design structures at the molecular level.

One of the most anticipated applications of MOFs is...

It is certainly happy news, isn't it? Since Japanese people aren't chosen every year, it is genuinely pleasing in a year like this.

However, as you might guess from the headline, this article does not stop at detailing the research results, but sincerely confronts structural problems regarding research in Japan. While cost-performance and time-performance are good, does a society that disparages inefficiency really have a future?

Honestly, jumping to the URL below is also inefficient, so I'm sure many people haven't jumped, but as they say, 'more haste, less speed'.

From the #sustainablenote Editorial Department