The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for the reactions in which chemistry picks one of two mirror-image molecules

The facts: on 7 October 2026 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri B. Kagan of Université Paris-Sud in France and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science in Japan “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”. Molecules such as amino acids exist in two forms that are each other’s mirror image, but living organisms contain only one; the chemistry of life is called homochiral, after the Greek words for “same” and “hand”. How such asymmetry could have emerged was long a mystery. When chemists ran reactions that can form both mirror-image molecules, they always obtained equal proportions in the test tube. Kagan took the first decisive step in 1986: a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, which let him create a greater excess of one of the mirror images than had previously been thought possible. Soai took the next: a publication from 1995 describes how he designed the first ever chemical reaction with the potential to be homochiral, and in 2003 he succeeded with a reaction in which only one of the two possible mirror images was formed. The chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Heiner Linke, says the two provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The prize is 12 million Swedish kronor, shared equally between the two.