According to Sina Finance, the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for their discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.

The Nobel Committee said the two solved a century-old chemistry puzzle about how homochirality arises spontaneously. Committee Chair Heiner Linke said their reactions were remarkable.

Kagan made a decisive first step in 1986 by finding a new way to control chemical reactions, allowing one mirror-image molecule to dominate far beyond what had previously been thought possible.

Soai later made the key breakthrough. In 1995, a paper introduced the first chemical reaction with the potential to generate homochiral products, and in 2003 he achieved the final success by creating a reaction that produced only one of the two mirror-image molecules.