French chemist Henri B. Kagan shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for asymmetric synthesis

7 October 2026

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a French chemist and a Japanese chemist for work on why living matter prefers one hand of a molecule over its mirror image. The citation reads: for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Henri B. Kagan, born in 1930 at Boulogne-Billancourt in France, took his doctorate at the College de France in 1960 and is Professor Emeritus at the then Universite Paris-Sud. His 1986 finding of non-linear effects let chemists obtain a far larger excess of one mirror form than had been thought possible. Kenso Soai, born in 1950 at Hiroshima, is Professor Emeritus at the Tokyo University of Science; he designed a reaction that could in principle generate single-handedness, and in 2003 produced one that formed only one of the two mirror molecules. The announcement explains homochirality, the fact that organisms use only one of the two forms of molecules such as amino acids. The two share the prize equally, and the award carries 12 million Swedish kronor. The Academy notes that these discoveries matter for designing reactions used to manufacture medicines.