STOCKHOLM — French chemist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for discovering how chemical reactions can produce just one of a molecule’s two mirror-image forms, a puzzle at the heart of how life’s chemistry works, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.
The academy cited the pair “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.” Molecules such as amino acids come in two mirror-image versions, like left and right hands, but living things use only one. Laboratory reactions usually yield an even mix of both, which matters in medicine because one version of a drug molecule may help while the other does nothing or causes harm, BBC News reported.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. Kagan took the first step in 1986 with a way to create a greater excess of one mirror image than was thought possible. Soai described a reaction with the potential to be homochiral in 1995 and in 2003 achieved one that formed only one of the two possible forms. “Other than life itself, no one had previously achieved this feat,” the academy said.
Kagan, born in 1930 in Boulogne-Billancourt, is professor emeritus at the former Université Paris-Sud. Soai, born in 1950 in Hiroshima, is professor emeritus at Tokyo University of Science. Speaking by phone to the prize press conference, Soai said: “This is one of the most exciting days of my life.” The laureates will share 12 million Swedish kronor. The literature prize is announced Thursday and the peace prize Friday.
Sources: NobelPrize.org, BBC News, NPR
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