Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai

jacob_rezi

Related to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life

zshn

Chirality is quite interesting!

m12k

See also this discussion about this in the sci-fi series The Expanse, where a planet has bi-chiral organisms (able to use both versions of these molecules): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/i4e187/a_small_...

WillAdams

This is a plot point in one of my most favourite science fiction novels by Roger Zelazny... bit of a spoiler, so ROT13: _Qbbejnlf va gur Fnaq_ which still has my favourite life situation for a protagonist (room, board, tuition and generous stipend so long as he attends his uncle's alma mater until such time as he graduates....)

mhrmsn

Cool, brings back some memories from grad school. Always found these types of reactions with self-reenforcing quite interesting. Reminds me of another paper where just stirring a solution or not would determine the chirality of crystals formed and gives an idea how highly chiral environments can arise from "nothing": Chiral symmetry breaking in sodium chlorate crystallizaton https://doi.org/10.1126/science.250.4983.975

PowerElectronix

>Other than life itself, no one had achieved this feat. Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty impresive.

dekhn

I remember first learning about chirality in my biochemistry course in college, and it was definitely a mind-blower. I had already started to understand that molecules had 3d structures, but the idea (and attempting to visualize it mentally) of mirror image molecules stretched my brain significantly. It's also still amazing to me how people first recognized this: poking around looking at the crystals that form in the bottom of a wine under a microscope, noticing that some of them were mirror images of the other, and then seperating them manually with tweezer, dissolving them into two different solutions, and demonstrating that they rotated light in opposite directions .

dooglius

Does this imply a parity violation (and thus that the weak force must somehow ultimately be in involved in the reaction)?

ahmedfromtunis

As a right-handed person, I find this deeply offensive and request all left-handed life be destroyed at once!! That said, would it be possible to make "right-handed" food that is safe to eat, satisfies the psychological urge to consume food in every sensory measure, but still contributes 0 calories?

amoriz

For 1m I thought I would re learn chemistry. Then I remembered how diff it was at the uni.

Bayes7

The popular information is always a great read for non-experts! https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/popular-inf...

sendtown_expwy

I have to admit that when I read the intro header of the piece on the page, “They made chemistry choose a mirror image,” it struck me as LLM-speak and I immediately lost interest. I have no idea whether the authors used one to draft that phrase, which seems like an innocent summary of their contributions, but somehow I feel like if it were three years ago we would have never seen that in the title.

altilunium

We have matter-antimatter asymmetry in physics... and now I just learned there's a similar concept in chemistry (one variant frequently occurs in life while the other mirrored variant is rarely found in nature)

hypertexthero

Going to fire up Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

Gensui

Congratulations to Professor Soai on winning the Nobel Prize. The discovery of asymmetric autocatalysis is truly groundbreaking, and as a fellow Japanese, I am incredibly proud of this achievement.

yawz

Do I understand correctly that Kagan has been working on his part for (more than) 40 years?

haunter

Fun fact: his family name in kanji 硤合 is so rare that most people don't even know how to read it thus most japanese news sites using a hiragana translation そあい

pfdietz

The chirality of biomolecules is also the source of the differentiation of left and right in a developing embryo. Cilia form that are tilted toward the tail of the embryo. The chirality of the protein motors driving them causes them to turn clockwise, which creates a leftward flow of water. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1180515/ https://hms.harvard.edu/news/telling-left-right-organ-develo...

bizzyskillet

In 2004, left-handed sugar was hyped as a way to eat junk food without absorbing the sugar. It turned out to be too expensive, but I think it's an interesting story (oddly involving Mars!). More here: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2004/ch_4.html

smath

I watched the announcement video [0] and found it strange that they cut off Prof Soai during the last question — he was trying to understand whether he was being asked for his favorite molecule in the context of autocatalysis or in general. [0] https://www.youtube.com/live/a9Bhx9wEt8U?is=Oo2PRZAZgDjZV9TN