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...
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