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Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for their discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.
“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a news statement. “The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular.”
The duo’s discoveries “have been decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals,” Linke added.
Kagan, 95, and born in France, is affiliated with Université Paris-Saclay in Orsay, France, and Soai, born in Japan in 1950, conducts research at the Tokyo University of Science.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners in Stockholm. They will share in a prize totalling 12 million Swedish crowns ($1.7 million Cdn).
Many of the molecules essential to life exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, like left and right hands. Yet living organisms almost exclusively use only one version, a phenomenon known as “homochirality” — from the Greek word for hand — that has puzzled chemists for more than a century.
Kagan and Soai found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror-image — work that has been key for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.
“I’m very excited to receive the very nice news,” Soai told the committee and journalists by phone. “Of course this is one of the most exciting days in my life.”
He said he was shopping near his home when he was reached by the Nobel committee.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday. The economics prize will be announced Oct. 12.
The Nobel prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. The Swedish chemist and entrepreneur dictated in his will that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund “prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
