His interview with the Nobel Prize Committee reveals that Professor Kitagawa comes from a stimulating environment. At Kyoto University, there is a strong drive to create, in terms of both materials and knowledge. Previous Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Kenichi Fukui (1981) and Akira Yoshino (2019), have influenced Kitagawa’s work and mindset. He refers to Fukui as his academic grandfather and to Yoshino as his senior at the same laboratory.

Of course, hard work is also part of it. ‘This is the mindset of the Japanese researcher: never switch off the light, even at night,’ Kitagawa says in the interview. He was at the forefront of the functional chemistry of MOFs and also discovered flexible MOFs. The work of the Director of the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) has expanded upon and fundamentally underpinned the foundation laid by co-laureate Richard Robson, ultimately leading to innovations that are already widely used in industry, as reported after last year’s laureate announcement.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Kitagawa suggests that we are on the verge of a new era: the gas age. Following the era of “black gold” – the oil industry – porous MOFs now enable us to utilise “air gold”. According to Kitagawa, the air we breathe is naturally full of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen. ‘Even in small countries, air is equally distributed.’ He also quotes the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, whose two core ideas have shaped Kitagawa’s research: the ‘usefulness of the useless’ – the useful application of air (‘nothing’) and space (‘nothing’) in MOFs – and ‘Live by use of mist’. Mist contains water and air, providing everything you need. And MOFs reveal its potential.