They taught chemistry to pick its mirror image — and just won the Nobel Prize

Many molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands — yet life uses only one of each. For decades, nobody knew how to make a chemical reaction reliably produce just the one. Today the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai with the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for cracking it. Their discoveries — ways to amplify one mirror form out of a reaction, including a process where the desired molecule speeds up its own creation — changed how chemists build everything from medicines to scents and new materials. The Nobel committee called their work revolutionary. It is a reminder of what patient, curiosity-driven science can do: Kagan's and Soai's breakthroughs unfolded over decades before the world caught up.