Japanese scientist Kenso Soai and France’s Henri B. Kagan win Nobel Prize in chemistry

Japanese scientist Kenso Soai was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday along with France’s Henri B. Kagan “for the discovery of non‑linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”

The two chemists were credited for discoveries that drove homochirality — a state in which only one of two nonidentical mirror‑image forms of molecules is formed — the Nobel Committee said.

Two such mirrored variants, like left and right hands, occur in chemical reactions, but in life’s chemistry, only one of them is found in the proteins in the body’s cells.

The discoveries have helped chemists develop new pharmaceuticals. Chemists long strived to produce only one of these mirror images, because, in the development of molecules that will interact with living things such as pharmaceuticals, only one mirror image has the desired therapeutic effect while the other is unnecessary and could even have side effects.

Kenso Soai | The Japan Academy / via JIJI

Kagan took the first decisive step in 1986, when he discovered a new way of manipulating chemical reactions, creating a greater excess of one of the mirror images than had previously been thought possible, the committee said.

Soai then took the next step, publishing a paper in 1995 on the design of the first‑ever chemical reaction that had the potential to be homochiral and succeeding in creating the reaction in 2003.

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