The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 has been awarded to French chemist Henri B. Kagan and Japan's Kenso Soai for revealing why life prefers one mirror‑image form of molecules over another.
Life’s building blocks—amino acids, sugars and other chiral molecules—exist in two enantiomers that are mirror images of each other. Though they have identical physical and chemical properties, biology uses only one specific handedness.
For decades scientists have puzzled over the origin of this molecular handedness. Kagan and Soai’s breakthrough demonstrates that a simple, self‑replicating chemical reaction can amplify one enantiomer, creating a “chiral bias” that could seed the asymmetry seen in biochemistry.
Beyond solving a decades‑old mystery, the discovery offers new avenues for asymmetric synthesis, enabling the production of pharmaceuticals that rely on a single enantiomer for maximum efficacy and safety.
