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Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday.Fredrik Sandberg/The Associated Press
Two scientists who studied the properties and production of molecules that are mirror images of one another have been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
On Wednesday, members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Henri Kagan of the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay and Kenso Soai of the Tokyo University of Science will share this year’s chemistry Nobel.
In the 1990s, both made key contributions to the understanding of “chirality,” a property that means some molecules can have left and right-handed versions.
Their discoveries have proved important for the development of pharmaceuticals, many of which require the production of only one version of a molecule and not its mirror twin.
“How can a reaction be designed to spontaneously create only one of the two mirror images without involving any other chiral molecule? It is this puzzle that this year’s laureates have solved,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel committee for chemistry said during Wednesday’s announcement.
The researchers’ work also helps to illuminate why life on Earth is based on left-handed versions of certain organic molecules.
Each year the Chemistry prize marks the third in a series of Nobel prize announcements.
On Monday, Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for creating the field of optogenetics, a method of genetically modifying neurons to react to light that has transformed brain research.
On Tuesday, Francis Halzen, who leads a giant neutrino detection experiment in Antarctica, was named this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Nobel Peace Prize are scheduled to be announced on Thursday and Friday, respectively. The winner of this year’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Oct. 12.