Washington, DC — Omar Yaghi was travelling from San Francisco and had landed in Frankfurt when his phone started buzzing. The call was from Sweden. He had just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

"You cannot prepare for a moment like that," the American scientist of Palestinian origin said shortly after. "The feeling is indescribable."

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognises Yaghi, 60, alongside Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). These are porous, sponge-like structures that can capture toxic gases, drive chemical reactions, and harvest water from desert air.

The Nobel committee likened the metal-organic frameworks to Hermione's handbag from Harry Potter or Mary Poppins' enchanted carpet bag — compact on the outside yet capable of holding astonishingly vast spaces within.

For Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, the Nobel Prize represents more than scientific achievement; it's a validation of decades spent reimagining what's possible at the molecular level.

He grew up outside Amman, Jordan, the son of Palestinian refugees from the village of Al-Masmiyya between Jaffa and Jerusalem. His parents could barely read or write. His family lived in a single room, shared with livestock.

Water arrived in his neighbourhood for a few hours once every 14 days. If Yaghi didn't rise at dawn to open the taps, his family — and even their cow — would go without water.

Those early mornings, waiting for water that might not come, taught him something about scarcity. About what it means to need something as basic as water and not have it.

He left for the US at 15, learning English on the go. The path from that single room in Jordan to the pinnacle of scientific achievement wasn't straightforward, but it was illuminated by something Yaghi came to believe deeply: that science doesn't care where you come from.

"Science is a great equalising force in the world," he said in his first interview after the win.

It's a statement that takes on particular resonance given his background.

Yaghi started with almost nothing. No books in the house. No privilege. No running water most days. Parents who couldn't help with homework because they could barely read it themselves.

What he did have was curiosity that beautiful things could be built from understanding how molecules fit together. That intellectual problems were worth solving not just for their applications, but for their elegance.

"I set out to build beautiful things and solve intellectual problems," he told the Nobel Prize's Adam Smith.

"The deeper you dig, the more beautifully you find things are constructed."

Exile meets genius

That philosophy led him to invent an entirely new field.

Reticular chemistry deals with linking molecular building blocks into extended crystalline structures.

Think of it as molecular architecture, building frameworks at scales so small that they have to be measured in nanometres, yet so precisely engineered they can perform specific tasks.

The metal-organic frameworks pioneered by Yaghi are remarkable for their porosity. They're mostly empty space, which makes them incredibly light yet structurally stable. More importantly, that space can be designed to trap specific molecules. Toxic gases. Carbon dioxide. Water vapour.

It's the water application that harks back to his childhood mornings in Jordan. Yaghi went on to develop a metal-organic framework that acts like a sponge and could pull water vapour from the air.

Even in the desert. Even in places where water doesn't come through taps, not even once every 14 days.

The technology could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. People facing the same struggles that Yaghi's family once knew.

In lands where displacement is a daily shadow, like Masmiya in ‘old Palestine’, once home to his family's Bedouin village, where his father tended cattle, life carries the weight of both memory and loss.

Yaghi seldom makes any grand political statements about this connection. He doesn't need to.

His impact on modern science extends well beyond water harvesting.

The numbers reflect this breadth. A whopping 300 scientific papers published. More than 250,000 citations. An H-index of 190, which essentially means 190 of his papers have been cited at least 190 times each. It's a measure of influence that places him among the most impactful scientists of our age.

The son of soil

Before the Nobel, the honours had already accumulated. The prestigious Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018. The King Faisal International Prize in Science in 2015. Then, in 2024 alone, the Solvay Prize, Tang Prize, and Balzan Prize.

Yaghi received his PhD in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He taught at UCLA before joining UC Berkeley.

Standing at Frankfurt airport, phone in one hand, luggage in another, hearing he'd won the 2025 Nobel Prize, Yaghi signified something important about how knowledge works, fundamental aspect of which is that it doesn't always require privilege to pursue, and surely doesn't demand any pedigree.

It asks only for rigour, curiosity, and the patience to look closely at things.

From a single room as a poor refugee in Jordan to Stockholms Konserthus, the fabled Nobel Hall. From waiting for water to inventing ways to pull it from air.

To his students at Berkeley, Yaghi remains disarmingly humble. To his colleagues, a quiet pioneer. To his fellow Palestinians, scattered and displaced, he is a reminder that displacement can breed not just loss, but light.

And perhaps in the end, he may be Jordanian by circumstance, Saudi by citizenship, American by passport — yet he is unmistakably, indelibly, the son of Palestine.

A boy who once lined up buckets under a leaking tap has now bottled air itself.