The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenzo Soai, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced.

The prize comes with a cash award of 12 million Swedish kronor (approximately €1 million).

The two scientists are being honored “for the discovery of nonlinear phenomena and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis,” having made a decisive contribution to solving one of Chemistry’s most persistent problems: how so-called homochirality can arise spontaneously.

The phenomenon concerns molecules such as amino acids, which can exist in two different forms that are mirror images of each other, just like the right and left hand.

In nature, however, and particularly in living organisms, one of the two forms overwhelmingly predominates.

For decades, scientists had been trying to understand how nature arrived at this choice.

The issue is also of enormous importance to the pharmaceutical industry, as the two mirror-image forms of the same molecule can have different effects on the human body.

Kagan’s First Step

Henri Kagan, from Université Paris-Sud in France, took the first decisive step in 1986, when he discovered a new way of controlling chemical reactions.

His work showed that it was possible to produce a much greater quantity of one mirror-image form of a molecule than the other, something that until then had been considered extremely difficult.

Soai’s Groundbreaking Discovery

Kenzo Soai, from the Tokyo University of Science, took the work even further.

In 1995, he presented a chemical reaction capable of amplifying one of the two mirror-image forms on its own through autocatalysis. In 2003, he ultimately achieved a reaction in which exclusively one of the two possible forms was produced.

According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, nothing like this had previously been achieved outside nature itself.

“Henri Kagan and Kenzo Soai solved a chemical mystery more than a century old: how homochirality can arise spontaneously. The chemical reactions they developed are remarkable,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

The discoveries of the two scientists are now considered fundamental to the development of new methods of organic synthesis and are of particular importance for the design and production of pharmaceuticals.