From Hilda Beaumont, Brighton, UK
As someone who completed a PhD in organometallic chemistry in the late 1960s, I was immediately drawn to your interview with Omar Yaghi about metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). One time I was leading a curriculum development project in which pupils aged 14 to 15 were required to design, but not make, products and services they considered to be beneficial to society based on a new and emerging material or technology (31 January, p 38).
These young minds conceived a wide range of innovative ideas, including clothing that changes colour as you dance, car tyres that sense their internal pressure, an epileptic fit detector, a self-weighing suitcase, an arthritis treatment device, keep-fit apparatus, a depth-sensitive submersible and an internal heartbeat monitor. I wonder what such minds would devise given MOFs as their starting point.
