Nobel Prize in Chemistry Is Awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai
New York Times · LC · trust 44/100
The Nobel Committee recognized them for solving a century-old mystery about how molecules with mirror images can emerge in nature.
Listen · 4:04 min Share full article 1 Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry during a news conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, on Wednesday. Credit... Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency, via Reuters By Cassandra Vinograd
Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for solving a longstanding mystery about mirror images in molecules.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences called their discoveries “decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.”
Mr. Kagan, 95, is French and a professor emeritus at Université Paris-Sud in France.
Mr. Soai was born in Hiroshima, Japan, and is a professor emeritus at the University of Science in Japan.
The Nobel Committee credited the men with solving a “mystery” that had long puzzled scientists: How can some molecules, such as amino acids, exist as two variants that are each other’s mirror images while the proteins in living organisms are made from only one of those mirror images?
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement .
“The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” he added.
Those helped solve the mystery of how that mirror property can spontaneously occur. Mr. Kagan took the “first decisive step in 1986,” the committee said, when he discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions that “allowed him to create a greater excess of one of the mirror images than had previously been thought possible.”
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