French-Japanese solvers of molecular mystery win Chemistry Nobel

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AFP) — France’s Henri Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering how to manipulate forms of key molecules, a crucial breakthrough for drug manufacturing.

Like hands, molecules such as amino acids exist as two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in the proteins in the body’s cells — a phenomenon known as “homochirality.”

“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, told a press conference.

Kagan, 95, is professor emeritus at the Universite Paris-Saclay in France while Soai, 76, is a professor at Tokyo University of Science.

Soai said he had received the call while out shopping for groceries.

He said he was “extremely happy” to be honored together with Kagan.

French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated Kagan on his prize on X, calling his achievement “a tremendous source of pride for the country.”

‘Truly wonderful people’

The academy in a separate statement likened the chirality conundrum to a locksmith creating keys to order but whenever they produce them they get two mirrored variants.

“Only one of them fits the lock — and the lock can be damaged if your customers try to unlock it with the other key.”

One example of the potential danger of using the wrong key, or version, was the thalidomide scandal in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when thousands of children were born with birth defects.