Chemistry Nobel for solving mystery of how ‘handed’ organic molecules can emerge

Two scientists who figured out how living organisms create molecules that are just one of two possible mirror-image variants have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Henri Kagan, University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France, and Kenso Soai, Tokyo University, Japan, share the 12-million Swedish kronor (US$1.2-million) prize, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October.

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“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. Soai said he was out shopping nearby his house when he received the call.

While they could occur in either form, life’s building blocks are one-handed or ‘homochiral’ — for example, DNA is right-handed while amino acids are left-handed.

In experiments in the 1980s, Kagan showed how to manipulate reactions so that a tiny asymmetry in handedness can be amplified. And in the 1990s, Soai demonstrated that a one-handed molecule can become a catalyst to make more products with its own chirality. Together they showed how natural reactions in living organisms could overwhelmingly produce just one type of mirror-image molecule.

“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, in a statement. “The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular.”

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Today, the discoveries are essential for chemists when designing reactions to create drugs, materials and even perfumes.

Kagan’s win could be viewed as righting a historical wrong. The French chemist narrowly missed out on receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001, for work on selectively synthesizing one mirror-image form. His omission triggered protests by his country’s science minister.