It would not be an overstatement to say that metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have redefined what materials can do for society. These porous crystalline structures are built from metal ions coordinated to organic linker molecules and offer gigantic amounts of internal surface area. Their cavities can be tuned to trap greenhouse gases, harvest drinking water from air, and store hydrogen or methane as clean fuels. As industries confront climate change and scarce resources, MOFs exemplify chemistry’s power to reimagine sustainability, atom by atom. The roots of this year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize , awarded to the developers of MOFs , go back to the 1980s, when Richard Robson, then at the University of Melbourne, wondered whether molecular architectures could be designed rather than found. In

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