Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 Goes to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for Autocatalysis in Asymmetric Synthesis

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to France's Henri B. Kagan of Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, and Japan's Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science, announced on 7 October 2026, "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis". The two share 12 million Swedish kronor. Their work explains how molecules existing as non-superimposable mirror images can come to favour a single handedness: the Soai reaction amplifies a minute chiral imbalance into near-total purity, offering a chemical route to the homochirality of life's building blocks — a puzzle chemists had faced for over a century.