Even for an institution with a disproportionately high number of Nobel laureates, it was an extraordinary week. In just three days this October, the University of California set the world record for the most Nobel Prizes awarded to one university system in a single year (five), with four of those having connections to UC Berkeley.
It started on October 6, when UC San Diego and UCLA alumnus Fred Ramsdell was awarded a share in the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking work on the human immune system.
The next day, it was announced that Berkeley physicist John Clarke would share the Nobel Prize in Physics with two of his protégés: former postdoc Michel Devoret and grad student John Martinis ’80, Ph.D. ’86, both now on faculty at UC Santa Barbara, for foundational research they conducted on a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.
And, finally, on October 8, news came from Stockholm that Professor Omar Yaghi shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal‑organic frameworks (MOFs). He is the first person of Palestinian descent to win a science Nobel.
“These remarkable achievements by five UC-affiliated Nobel Prize winners reflect the very best of the world-changing teaching, research, and public service happening across our university,” said UC President James B. Milliken. “Our nation and world will be better off because of these discoveries. More communities will have clean drinking water, more people will be protected from cyberattacks, and more patients will have access to better treatments for diseases like arthritis and multiple sclerosis.”
When the call came just after 2 a.m. PST on Tuesday, October 7, Clarke almost didn’t answer.
“I wasn’t quite sure at the beginning whether or not this was a junk call, but it soon became clear that it was real,” he recalled during a press conference later that day. “I was sitting there just feeling completely stunned,” he said. “It had never occurred to me in my entire life that anything like this would ever happen.”
Clarke led a team of researchers, including Martinis and Devoret, in groundbreaking experiments at Berkeley in the 1980s. The trio showed that quantum tunneling—a bizarre phenomenon where particles pass through barriers—could happen not just at the atomic scale but also at the macroscopic level, specifically in a superconducting electrical circuit. While quantum computers have yet to hit the mainstream, Clarke’s research accelerated progress in that direction, paving the way for the development of superconducting quantum bits, or qubits, and other technology, like ultralow-frequency MRIs.
“Their research has opened the door to the next generation of quantum technologies, including quantum cryptography, computers, and sensors—breakthroughs that will change how we do everything from discovering new drugs to stopping destructive cyberattacks,” Milliken said.
Yaghi’s path to the Nobel began in the 1990s, when he pioneered a new kind of molecular architecture, built from metal ions and organic, carbon-based molecules. This field of “reticular chemistry,” as Yaghi named it, applied a building-block approach to create porous structures through which gases and other chemicals can flow. Dubbed MOFs, these materials have since been used to harvest water from desert air and capture carbon dioxide.
“Metal-organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
With the latest additions, Berkeley’s official Nobel count hit 63, with 28 faculty and 35 alumni winners, celebrating everything from Ernest Lawrence’s development of the cyclotron to Czesław Miłosz’s internationally acclaimed poetry. But the recent accolades also come in the wake of federal funding cuts and other existential threats to American academia, a dark irony that was not lost on the awardees.
“I certainly know personally people who have lost most of their funding,” Clarke said in the press conference. “And it’s not just physics,” he said, citing the National Institutes of Health’s termination of billions of dollars of research grants. “This is going to cripple science, and it’s going to be disastrous.”
Clarke, who has spent the entirety of his academic career at Berkeley, credited the university with providing the resources necessary to conduct his award-winning work.
“One of the things that has made the Berkeley physics department such a great place to work is the fact that we have this enormous amount of support,” including funding, lab space, and increasingly expensive equipment, he said. “Without that level of support, none of us would be able to do what we do.”
