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News: The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for discoveries explaining how homochirality can emerge spontaneously.
About 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Winners:
- Henri B. Kagan from France, and
- Kenso Soai from Japan.
- Awarded for: The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded for discoveries of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.
- These discoveries enabled chemists to control reactions and produce predominantly or exclusively one of two molecular mirror images, leading to homochirality.
- Homochirality: Homochirality refers to the state in which only one of two mirror-image forms of a molecule is present.
- In life’s chemistry, for example, amino acids exist as two mirror-image forms, but only one form is found in proteins.
Key Contributions by Winners
- Henri B. Kagan – Controlling Molecular Asymmetry:
- Kagan studied how chemical reactions could be made to produce more of one mirror-image molecule than the other.
- He found that changing the proportion of the two mirror-image forms in a reaction could produce a much different proportion of the resulting products, showing a non-linear effect.
- In 1986, he developed a method to manipulate chemical reactions so that they produced a greater excess of one mirror-image form than previously thought possible.
- Kenso Soai – Achieving Homochirality:
- Building on Kagan’s work, Soai searched for non-linear, asymmetric reactions that could catalyse their own formation.
- In 1995, he designed the first chemical reaction with the potential to become homochiral.
- In 2003, he demonstrated a reaction that produced only one of the two possible mirror-image forms.
