Henri Kagan, at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Kenso Soai, at Tokyo University, share the 12-million Swedish kronor (US$1.2-million) prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October. 'I am very excited to receive the very nice news about the Nobel prize. This is one of the most exciting days in my life,' said Soai, speaking to the Nobel committee after the prize was announced, adding that he was out shopping near his house when he received the call. Although they could occur in either form, life's building blocks are one-handed or 'homochiral' ' for example, DNA is right-handed whereas amino acids in humans are left-handed. The prize-winning discovery relates to the key question of how this chemical asymmetry emerges in nature. In experiments conducted in the 1980s, Kagan showed how a small asymmetry in the handedness of a catalyst can be amplified in the reaction products1. Then in 1995, Soai designed a reaction in which a chiral product was also itself a catalyst, driving even greater asymmetry in handedness2. Together, this research suggests how natural reactions in living organisms might overwhelmingly produce just one type of mirror-image molecule....

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 05 August 2026...

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 28 January 2026...

Susumu Kitagawa, Omar Yaghi and Richard Robson have won the 2025 chemistry Nobel for the development of metal-organic frameworks.Credits: Kota Kawasaki/Yomiuri Shimbun via AP/Alamy, Brittany Hosea-Small/UC Berkeley, Paul Burston/University of Melbourne Susumu Kitagawa at Kyoto University in Japan, Richard Robson at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Omar Yaghi at the University of California, Berkeley, will share the prize of 11-million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million), for inventing a new form of molecular architecture. Because they have such a vast internal surface area, MOFs could potentially be used to store gases, act as catalysts and deliver drugs, among many other applications. 'This year's laureates'have found ways to create materials, entirely novel materials, with large cavities on their insides,' said Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke, a nanophysicist at Lund University in Sweden, at a press conference announcing the prize. 'A small amount of such material can almost be like Hermione's handbag in Harry Potter ' it can store huge amounts of gas in a tiny volume'....