The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japanese scientist Kenso Soai for discoveries showing how chemical reactions can produce one of the two mirror-image forms of a molecule.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, announced the winners on Wednesday. Each will receive an equal share of the 12 million Swedish kronor prize.
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The two chemists’ research has shed light on a phenomenon related to chirality, the property that allows some molecules to exist in two mirror-image configurations, known as enantiomers.
Although they have the same chemical composition, these forms can behave differently. Controlling which of the two is produced is essential in the pharmaceutical field.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have solved a chemical mystery that is more than a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a press release.
