Stockholm, Oct. 7 -- The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday (local time) awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Henri B Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis."

According to an official release by the Nobel Prize, life's chemistry is what chemists call homochiral, after the Greek words for "same" and "hand". Like hands, all amino acids exist as two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in the proteins in your cells. The other is rarely found in nature.

For a long time, chemists wondered how homochirality can emerge. When they began to experiment with chemical reactions that can form two mirrored molecules, they always obtained e...