The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan's Kenso Soai for solving the long‑standing puzzle of why life prefers one mirror‑image version of chiral molecules.
The Nobel Committee noted that molecules such as the amino acids that compose proteins are chiral, meaning they exist in two mirror‑image forms. However, biological systems exclusively use only one of these forms. Kagan and Soai have now expanded our understanding of why this selective use occurs.
This discovery fills a crucial gap in our knowledge of how life’s molecular components achieve uniformity, paving the way for new insights into drug design, synthetic chemistry, and the origins of life.
