A century-old chemical riddle that has puzzled researchers — why nature overwhelmingly selects just one “handed” form of certain molecules — has now been cracked, earning France’s Henri Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The discovery is decisive for the development of pharmaceuticals.
Like hands, where humans have both a left hand and a right hand, all amino acids exist as two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in the proteins in the body’s cells.
The other is rarely found in nature, a phenomenon known as “homochirality”, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained.
Chirality is handedness, and the central question has been why only one of two versions predominates in living systems — left handedness in amino acids and right handedness in DNA, for example.
Chemists have long wondered how that selection happens, and the Nobel committee said the two laureates’ work has now “enabled chemists to drive chemical reactions that lead to homochirality”.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
The pair were honoured “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”, the jury said.
“Their discoveries have been decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.”
Last year, the chemistry prize went to Japan’s Susumu Kitagawa, UK-born Richard Robson and American-Jordanian Omar Yaghi for developing a method of designing molecular structures.
A week of Nobel prizes
The chemistry prize follows the physics prize, which yesterday honoured Belgian physicist Francis Halzen for groundbreaking work using Antarctic ice to capture particles originating in the distant cosmos.
On Monday, the medicine prize was awarded to US psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and German scientists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.
The literature laureate will be revealed tomorrow, with some pundits suggesting that the Swedish Academy could follow up last year’s award to Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai with a prize for a woman writer, possibly from Latin America.
The most keenly anticipated award – the peace prize – is due on Friday.
US President Donald Trump lobbied intensively last year to get the prize, and the committee is aware he will be watching closely again.
The economics prize wraps up the Nobel season on 12 October.
The Nobel consists of a diploma, a gold medal and a 12-million-kronor (€1.1m) prize sum, which is shared if there is more than one winner in a discipline.
The laureates will receive their prizes at a formal ceremony on 10 December, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of scientist Alfred Nobel, who created the prizes in his will.
