What was the Chemistry Nobel Prize given for? | Explained

STORY SO FAR: The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for showing that it is possible to amplify a molecule’s “handedness,” and direct it in a way that it can be used to produce pharmaceutical products of a very high purity. Their work also offers clues to explaining how life on earth could have evolved from simple molecules.

Your left and right hand have the same number of fingers with ring fingers and thumbs on both of the same length yet why is that you can’t wear the left hand’s glove on the right? The reason is ‘chirality,’ from the Greek kheir, hand. Many chemical molecules that make up substances, including the organic molecules that make up things like DNA, also possess this property of chirality. The mirror-images of a molecule, the left and right-glove so to say, are called ‘enantiomers.’ Paradoxically the organic molecules that make up living organisms are overwhelmingly either left-handed or right-handed and in nature do not present themselves in 50:50 proportions. This property, of ‘homochirality,’ is as if a fashion house decided to base its entire business on making only left-handed gloves and accessories customised to it. Or as we observe, most people are right-handed and urban fixtures like door-knobs, car wipers and a whole lot of implements seem actively biased against left-handed people.