New Delhi, October 7, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French chemist Henri B. Kagan and Japanese chemist Kenso Soai for their pioneering discoveries of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday.
The Nobel Committee said the scientists were honoured for breakthroughs that helped solve a longstanding mystery surrounding the emergence of molecular asymmetry, or homochirality, in nature.
The laureates will share a prize of 12 million Swedish kronor.
Many molecules, including amino acids, exist in two mirror-image forms. Although these variants have similar chemical properties, living organisms overwhelmingly use only one of them. Scientists had struggled for decades to explain how such molecular selectivity could arise naturally.
According to the Nobel Committee, conventional chemical synthesis typically produces equal quantities of the two mirror-image forms. The work of Kagan and Soai demonstrated how chemical reactions can instead be directed towards producing predominantly, or even exclusively, one molecular mirror image.
“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 made a major breakthrough in 1986 by developing a method to influence chemical reactions, making it possible to produce a much larger excess of one molecular mirror image than had previously been achieved.
Building on this work, Soai demonstrated in 1995 a groundbreaking chemical reaction with the potential to become homochiral. In 2003, he achieved a landmark result by presenting a reaction that produced only one of the two possible mirror-image forms, a phenomenon previously observed only in biological systems.
The Academy said the discoveries have had a significant impact on modern chemistry, particularly in pharmaceutical research and manufacturing, where producing the correct molecular mirror image can be crucial to a drug’s therapeutic effectiveness.
Kagan, born in 1930 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, earned his PhD from the Collège de France in 1960 and is Professor Emeritus at the former Université Paris-Sud.
Soai, born in 1950 in Hiroshima, Japan, received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1979 and is Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University of Science.
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