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Kagan and 95-year-old Soai win Chemistry Nobel
The Indian Express··5d ago
Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday in Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Soai, 95, is at Tokyo University of Science. Kagan is at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. The prize is 12 million Swedish crowns.
Prism
What It Means For You
- Drug makers use these tools to favour one mirror-image molecule in medicines.
- Flavour and agricultural chemical firms also rely on controlling enantiomer excess.
- Labs chasing homochiral amino acids and sugars cite the Soai reaction as a model.
What's Happening
- The Academy said the pair showed how reactions can favour one mirror form.
- Kagan found reactions can yield a larger excess of one enantiomer than once assumed.
- Soai built a reaction that forms only one of two possible mirror-image products.
Why Mirror Molecules Matter
- Living cells largely use one amino-acid orientation, called homochirality.
- Ordinary lab reactions once produced equal amounts of both mirror forms.
- Kagan's breakthrough on controlling excess dates to 1986 in the Academy account.
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