The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to two scientists for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.
Henri B. Kagan, French, and his Japanese colleague Kenso Soai will share a $1.2 million award, confirmed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday, October 7, 2026.
The prize is awarded for their work on breaking a longstanding mystery about mirror images in molecules.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences labelled their discoveries “decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.”
Kagan, 95, is professor emeritus at Université-Paris-Sud in France. Soai, a Japanese native born in Hiroshima, Japan, is an emeritus professor at the University of Science in Japan.
On what grounds did the committee award the Nobel Prize?
The Nobel Committee awarded the coveted prize in chemistry to these men for cracking a “mystery” that had long remained unsolved.
Heiner Linke, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a statement that “Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old.”
“The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” he added.
Those helped unfold the mystery of how that mirror property can spontaneously happen.
Kagan took the “first decisive step in 1986,” the committee said, when he discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions that “allowed him to create a greater excess of one of the mirror images than had previously been thought possible.”
While Soai built on that work, designing “the first ever chemical reaction that had the potential to be homochiral,” which he finally achieved in 2003, the committee added.
The coveted prize for chemistry was the third of six Nobel Prizes awarded this year.
The next in line is the Nobel Prize in Literature that will be announced on Thursday, October 8, 2026.
