MELBOURNE, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) — University of Melbourne Professor Richard Robson, who was simply awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry a day earlier, appeared on campus on Thursday to provide a tutorial class to the first-year chemistry college students and was interviewed by the varsity media crew.
“It’s a great honor and it’s a pleasure, but there are upsides and downsides.”
He confused that collaboration with fellow scientists helped his research.
“In the early days I was working alone, but it was only when I had collaboration with people like (colleagues) Bernard Hoskins and Brendan Abrahams that the whole thing became viable. They provided the real science. I was just a hand waver.”
Robson, 88, mentioned he acquired the news “remarkably calmly.”
“Every Tuesday I get fish for Tuesday and Wednesday dinners. (On Wednesday) I had cooked the fish and we were sitting out to have it, my wife and I and then all this commotion started but I did finish my fish, it’s a bit cold and then I had to do the washing up. So that’s how it went us.”
“I thought it would have been much better 30 years ago than when I was able to appreciate it … your emotional response to things like this changes with the years. So I took it remarkably calmly.”
Robson began to work within the University of Melbourne in 1966. In 1974, he was requested by his boss to make some fashions to “brighten up the teaching”.
“I headed to the workshop. They had to drill holes into the balls to represent the atoms in this structure.”
“As I was putting them together, it became sort of automatic. Once you’d started putting them together, it became an automatic process.”
Asked to sum up his research in 30 seconds, he mentioned, “Basically we’re trying to make organic units generally with specific, geometrical and chemical functional properties that are designed to interact with metal lines and give infinite structures of targeted connectivity and geometry. That was the basic idea.”
Robson, along with Susumu Kitagawa, a professor at Kyoto University in Japan and Omar M. Yaghi, a professor on the University of California, Berkeley within the United States, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for growing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences introduced.