{"id":499,"date":"2026-10-07T13:15:02","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=499"},"modified":"2026-10-07T13:15:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:15:13","slug":"nobel-chemistry-2026-kagan-soai-chirality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=499","title":{"rendered":"CHEMISTRY NOBEL GOES TO THE MIRROR-MOLECULE MASTERS! | France\u2019s Henri Kagan and Japan\u2019s Kenso Soai cracked a century-old riddle \u2014 why life builds with only one \u201chand\u201d of its molecules \u2014 and handed drug chemists a way to make the right one"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Look at your hands. That\u2019s the prize. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to <strong>Henri B. Kagan<\/strong> of Universit\u00e9 Paris-Sud in France and <strong>Kenso Soai<\/strong> of Tokyo University of Science in Japan \u201cfor the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis,\u201d the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/chemistry\/2026\/press-release\/\">Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences<\/a> announced Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>The riddle: many molecules, like amino acids, come in two mirror-image versions \u2014 \u201cchiral,\u201d like left and right hands. Life uses only one. But lab reactions usually spit out a 50-50 mix, and in medicine that matters, because one version can fight disease while the other does nothing or even causes harm, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/c6ly038jg0d4o\">BBC News<\/a> explains.<\/p>\n<p>Kagan took the first decisive step in <strong>1986<\/strong>, finding a way to manipulate reactions to create a bigger excess of one mirror image than anyone thought possible. Soai went further: in <strong>1995<\/strong> he described the first reaction with the potential to be homochiral, and in <strong>2003<\/strong> he pulled it off \u2014 a reaction that formed only one of the two possible mirror images. \u201cOther than life itself, no one had previously achieved this feat,\u201d the academy says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHenri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,\u201d said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. Committee member Peter Somfai called it \u201cprobably the most fundamental question in life,\u201d adding that something like it happened four billion years ago \u2014 \u201cand now we have, for the first time, mimicked that in the lab.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Soai, on the phone with the Nobel press conference: \u201cThis is one of the most exciting days of my life.\u201d Kagan was born in 1930; Soai in 1950. They split <strong>12 million Swedish kronor<\/strong> \u2014 about $1.25 million, per the BBC \u2014 and the academy says their work has been decisive for chemists designing reactions to make pharmaceuticals.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sources:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/prizes\/chemistry\/2026\/press-release\/\">NobelPrize.org press release<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/c6ly038jg0d4o\">BBC News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>France\u2019s Henri Kagan and Japan\u2019s Kenso Soai cracked a century-old riddle \u2014 why life builds with only one \u201chand\u201d of its molecules \u2014 and handed drug chemists a way to make the right one<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/bb-nobel-chemistry-chirality-1007.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions\/501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}