In the long history of people taken by surprise when their life’s work is recognised by a Nobel Prize, Professor Richard Robson’s reaction has to be near the peak of humility.
In a genuinely fascinating and entertaining interview released by the University of Melbourne, the 2025 Nobel Prize co-winner for Chemistry painted a picture of persisting with his idea in isolation, after challenging times with co-workers.
Professor Robson began work with the University in 1966 and his Nobel Prize will do no harm for the University’s rankings – with the University preening its top-of-the table plumage after scooping the pool in the Times Higher Education rankings (story below).
Professor Robson received congratulations from across the nation on Wednesday night, but was initially concerned about his fish.
“Every Tuesday I get fish for Tuesday and Wednesday dinners and I had cooked the fish and we were sitting down to have it, my wife and I and then all this commotion started.
“But I did finish my fish, it was a bit cold, and then I had to do the washing up.”
In a frank and humble interview, the newly anointed Nobel Laureate initially came up with the idea to create metal-organic frameworks with the potential to serve as gas and energy storage devices after creating teaching models of basic chemical structures for use in first year classes, but kept setting aside the idea as other competing tasks occupied his attention.
Around 10 years after the initial idea, he set to work to create compounds, to test the possibility of creating metal-organic frameworks.
“All sort of political things were going on around here and I was sort of desperate in some ways and I thought I better get on and see if this idea had any value.”
He continued to refine his compounds for years, but it was only when close colleague Bernard Hoskins started to ‘read’ them with xray crystallography “that any real science happened” he said.
He realised immediately with his first publication on the new structures in 1989 that it was a big breakthrough and could be a new field of science.
“Basically we were trying to make organic units generally with specific geometrical and chemical functional properties that are designed to interact with metal ions and give infinite structures of targeted connectivity and geometry,” he explained.
Around 30 students were involved in developing and studying metal-organic frameworks over the next 15-20 years, before Professor Robson retired.
He is still excited about the prospect of superconductivity being unlocked through the structures, but said that was still a long way off.
“I have been retired for 20 years and I am really out of touch with this, and I am not aware of any world shattering practical application but lots of people in the field talk about this.”
“I think it’s important even if there aren’t any applications but that’s from a sort of an unworldly point of view.”
Professor Robson said he wished the honour had come 30 years earlier, closer to the time of his work, so that he could have enjoyed it at the time, but said it was a great honour.
Professor Hoskins told the Nobel Prize team that he often wished he had become a mathematician.
“I sort of drifted into it, I couldn’t think of anything better to do,”
He later reflected on the long, often lonely journey to the Nobel stage.
“I was very isolated, I have been isolated most of my life. In the late 80s I guess it was from 94 onwards when I started getting involved in this, so I was doing all this work on my own, without students in the area and that sort of thing would not be possible at all nowadays,” Professor Robson said.
“In the early days I was working alone but it was only when I had collaboration with people like Bernard Hoskins and Brendan Abrahams that the whole thing became viable. They provided the real science. I was just a handwaver. A sort of arty type.”
“Some people in the middle 80’s thought it was a whole lot of rubbish … Anyway it didn’t work out that way.”