NewzHenri B Kagan of France and Kenso Soai from Japan were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2026. They unveiled the fascinating reason why living organisms favor left-handed amino acids over right-handed ones. Their groundbreaking research focused on generating pharmaceuticals that utilize only the beneficial mirror form of amino acids.
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. One mirror image of the chemical carvone smells like mint, for example, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.Even life itself prefers one mirror image over the other.
DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.Versions of the same molecule can behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror image.“This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
“Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality,” a term that comes from the Greek word for “hand.”The discovery enabled most modern medicinesScientists paid tribute to Kagan and Soai's work, which the Nobel committee described as a feat never previously achieved by anyone “other than life itself.”“It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this,” Somfai said. “I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function.”In the 1980s, Kagan’s work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process.
He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule’s mirror images, in what’s now known as the Soai reaction.“The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.Kagan, 95, is affiliated with the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. Scientists honoured for solving mystery of asymmetric molecules that has helped in manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Kagan and Kenso Soai have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on understanding mirror image molecules.
This breakthrough is significant for drug development in modern medicine. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to devel...
Summary from source