The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri Kagan (France) and Kenso Soai (Japan) for discoveries that enabled chemists to control reactions leading to homochirality, according to the Nobel Committee’s website.
The scientists will share 12 million Swedish kronor (€1.067 million) equally.
What is homochirality?
Living organisms use only one of the two mirror-image forms of amino acids to build proteins. This feature is called homochirality. The other form of amino acids occurs extremely rarely in nature.
For a long time, chemists tried to understand how homochirality arises. When they carried out experiments with chemical reactions capable of producing two mirror-image molecules, test tubes always yielded equal amounts of both forms. However, chemists wanted to obtain only one of these mirror-image forms because, when developing molecules that interact with living organisms (for example, in pharmaceuticals), only one of them produces the desired effect.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai solved a chemical mystery that had existed for more than a century: how homochirality can arise spontaneously. The chemical reactions they developed are remarkable,” said Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
In 1986, Henri Kagan discovered a new way to control chemical reactions, allowing him to obtain a far greater excess of one of the mirror-image forms than had previously been thought possible.
In 2003, Kenso Soai presented a reaction that produced only one of the two possible mirror-image forms. Before that, no one had managed to achieve such a result, apart from nature itself.
The scientists’ discoveries proved pivotal for chemists developing reactions to manufacture pharmaceutical medicines.
- The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa (Japan), Richard Robson (Australia) and Omar M. Yaghi (Jordan) for the development of metal-organic frameworks. This technology can be used to purify water and air.
- Tomorrow, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced — on 8 October. The Peace Prize winner will be announced on 9 October, and the Economics Prize on 12 October.
- The official medal and diploma award ceremony will traditionally take place on 10 December 2026 in Stockholm and Oslo.