Nordic Life Science 1
CHEMISTRY // OMAR M. YAGHI “DISCOVERY Omar Yaghi
CAN CHANGE THE WORLD” Captivated by the beauty of molecules and driven by curiosity and the prospect of making a real impact on society, Omar Yaghi, a chemist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry after 35 years of research on the development of metal-organic frameworks. T E X T B Y PAU L A P É R E Z G ON Z ÁL E Z -ANG U I ANO B ORN TO PALESTINIAN PARENTS, Omar Yaghi was raised in Amman, Jordan – one of the world’s most water-stressed regions, where when he was a child water would flow only once every two weeks for just a few hours. From a young age, he was deeply curious and enjoyed studying. One day, while in a library, he came across drawings of molecules and was instantly captivated by them, he describes. “I thought they were intriguing. I didn't know there were molecular drawings, and that got me very interested. From that moment, I couldn’t imagine studying anything else other than chemistry,” Omar Yaghi says. “I was captivated by the beauty of crystals during organic chemistry classes. There was something deeply appealing about them, their symmetry, their structure. That sense of beauty was what first drew me in. I wanted to study beautiful things, and I wanted to create beautiful things,” he adds. Later on, when Yaghi and his research team developed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), the question about how these structures could make a real impact on society naturally arose. That question guided the direction of his subsequent research, he says. MOFs are like rooms in a hotel MOFs are structures with an incredible storage capacity. Just one gram of MOFs could have a surface area roughly NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG | 51