Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai Awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Asymmetric Organic Synthesis

Key facts

• Henri Kagan of France and Kenso Soai of Japan have been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work on asymmetric organic synthesis that enabled chemists to drive reactions leading to homochirality.
• The winners will share a prize of 12 million Swedish kronor (about £904,000), along with a diploma and a medal each.
• Professor Kagan made a decisive step in 1985 at Université Paris-Sud by discovering a new way of manipulating chemical reactions to create more of one mirror image than previously thought possible.
• Professor Soai of the Tokyo University of Science published research in 1995 describing the first chemical reaction with the potential to be homochiral, and eight years later presented a reaction in which only one of the two possible mirror images formed.
• Nobel Committee for Chemistry chair Professor Heiner Linke said the laureates provided a solution to the century-old chemical mystery of how homochirality can emerge spontaneously.
• This is the 118th chemistry prize, awarded to 200 laureates since Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff received the inaugural prize in 1901.
• Henri Kagan, who won the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Centenary Prize in 1999/2000, became the 67th RSC Prize winner to later receive a Nobel Prize.