Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for work on mirror molecules
Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have been honoured for their work on making molecules form the correct mirror images
The 2026 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for their discovery of how to make molecules form the correct kind of mirror image. This enabled the molecules to be mass produced with chemical properties that are useful in various applications, such as medicines and agriculture.
Some molecules exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, which chemists call right- and left-handed. Nearly all molecules that make up life take the left-handed form.
For decades, whenever chemists carried out chemical reactions, they produced two forms of mirrored molecules in equal proportions. But they only wanted to make one of the mirror images when producing molecules that would interact with life, like medicines, because only one of the mirror molecules would have the desired effect.
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In 1986, Henri Kagan at Paris-Saclay University, France, discovered a way to tilt chemical reactions towards generating more of one mirror molecule over the other.
Taking this further, in 1995, Kenso Soai at the Tokyo University of Science, Japan, started to design chemical reactions that had the potential to produce only one mirror image. In 2003, he achieved this. His “Soai reaction” gets one form of mirror molecule to amplify itself, in a process known as autocatalysis, so the reaction products are almost entirely one form.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
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