“Gas Age” Has Arrived, Kitagawa Says in Nobel Lecture

Stockholm, Dec. 8 (Jiji Press)–Kyoto University professor Susumu Kitagawa, one of the three winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said Monday that the world has shifted over to a “gas age” through his own development of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs. “The trend is shifting from solid (and) liquid to gas, (and) so we are standing at the gas age,” the 74-year-old Japanese researcher said in his Nobel Lecture, titled “The Usefulness of the Useless–How MOFs Transformed the Concept of Porous Matter,” at Stockholm University. On his motto of “usefulness of the useless,” Kitagawa said that the idea is “very difficult to understand, but…this notion impressed me.” Kitagawa touched on the history of porous materials. He said that natural porous materials were used in dynamite, which was developed by Alfred Nobel. The broader use of MOFs will create a future of “air gold,” rather than real gold or “black” gold such as oil and coal, Kitagawa said. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]