Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for making reactions choose one mirror image

7 October 2026

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai.
The citation is "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis".
Some molecules, such as amino acids, exist as two mirror images, but living organisms contain only one of them, a property chemists call homochirality.
Kagan in 1986 found a way to obtain a far greater excess of one mirror image than had been thought possible; Soai described a reaction with the potential to be homochiral in 1995 and achieved it in 2003.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the two had solved a chemical mystery more than a century old.
Kagan, born 1930 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, is Professor Emeritus at the then Universite Paris-Sud; Soai, born 1950 in Hiroshima, is Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University of Science.
The prize amount is 12 million Swedish kronor, to be shared equally.