 U. Michigan’s Omar Yaghi on What's In Store for MOFs
Some phrases just
ring with a futuristic tone, despite our inescapable presence
already in the 21st century. One of them is "crystal
engineering." It suggests, for example, high-tech diamond
merchants mindful of a plan that goes beyond digging for their
wares. In truth, crystal engineering is a technology that’s
already arrived, with a host of applications from fuel cells on a
chip to nanosensors and molecular electronics. Crystal engineers
design their micro-modular materials out of molecular building
blocks from the bottom up, but they conceive the properties in
advance with the heady perspective of top-down design logic.
Among
the more remarkable of these crystalline materials to be
synthesized in the last decade are called "metal-organic
frameworks," or MOFs for short, products of the mind and the
laboratory of University of Michigan chemist Omar M. Yaghi. Yaghi’s
pioneering work in the creation of microporous crystalline and
solid-state materials has placed him among the 50 most-cited
scientists in chemistry in the last decade, according to Thomson
Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators .
Since 1994 Yaghi has racked up over 20 papers with more than 100
citations each, and his seminal 1998 review article
"Synthetic strategies, structure patterns, and emerging
properties in the chemistry of modular porous solids,"
published in Accounts of Chemical Research, has itself
tallied more than 600 citations (see table below, paper #1). Yaghi’s
papers on MOFs have regularly figured in the Chemistry Top Ten in
recent years—discussed, for example, in the issues for May-June
2001 and January-February
2004...
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 Sketches
of Spain Show Gain
Over
the last two decades, Spain has substantially increased its presence in world
science, according to a new Science Watch survey. The graph below, based
on figures from the Thomson Scientific National Science Indicators
database, shows Spain’s percent share of Thomson-indexed scientific papers
between 1981 and 2003. As the graph indicates, papers with at least one author
address in Spain accounted for less than 1% of the Thomson database in 1981—some
3,400 papers. By 2003, Spain’s share had grown to exceed 3% of the database,
with roughly 24,800 papers. In output, this represents an increase of more than
600% during the 23-year period...
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