3 August 2019 | New Scientist | 39connected by sticks, which he later learned
were molecular models. Yaghi sensed he was
looking at a template for everything around
him, that he had encountered some hidden
truth. And the feeling was heightened by his
being somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.
“It was like meeting a secret love,” he says.
When Yaghi was 15, his father sent him to
join his older brother Khaled in the US, even
though he spoke little English and didn’t want
to go. Yaghi arrived in New York, where he
enrolled in a community college. He excelled
and eventually became an assistant professor
of chemistry at Arizona State University,
where he set about finding new ways to
link up those little balls and sticks to make
previously unknown substances. Little did
he know that they might one day help quench
other people’s thirst.
By this time, in the early 1990s, chemists >Features
JEREMY HORNER/PANOS
10 children. His parents Mwannes and Sadika
were Palestinians who fled the fighting
following the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948. He lived in one room with his
brothers and sisters, and the family’s cattle,
in a home without electricity. Water was
piped in for a few hours each week, and Yaghi
sometimes had to get up at dawn to open
a valve to ensure it reached their tank. “You
had to think about every drop,” he says. “
Water was absolutely precious.”
Mwannes sold the gold jewellery he had
given Sadika as a wedding gift and used the
proceeds to set up a butcher’s shop. This
paid for Yaghi to attend a private Christian
missionary school, where his love of chemistry
was sparked at the age of 10 when, one
lunchtime, he sneaked into the library when it
was supposed to be closed. There, in a book, he
saw strange diagrams of different sized balls“ Even wealthy
places will be
vulnerable
to drought as
the planet’s
temperaturekeeps rising”