Franco-Japanese duo Kagan and Soai win 2026 Nobel Prize in chemistry
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai for unravelling the mystery of why only one of two forms of certain molecules occurs in nature.
Issued on: 07/10/2026 - RFI
By: Paul Myers
Many molecules can exist in two mirror-image forms, but in nature only one form often predominates – a phenomenon known as homochirality. Chemists have long struggled to explain how this happens.
Kagan and Soai's discoveries helped show how chemical reactions can be steered towards one molecular form rather than the other, work that has proved important in fields including pharmaceutical manufacturing, the Nobel committee said.
"They have enabled chemists to drive chemical reactions that lead to homochirality," the jury added.
One area of this field, asymmetric catalysis, had already been recognised with a Nobel Prize in 2001.
Kagan, professor emeritus at Paris-Saclay University, was not among the recipients then despite being widely regarded as one of the fathers of the technique. The omission prompted protests at the time from France’s Research Ministry.
Soai, 76, was out shopping near his home when he was informed of his award.
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“This is the most incredible day of my life,” the laureate said in a telephone interview with the Nobel Foundation.
The professor at the Tokyo University of Science added: "I think our prize should lead people to recognise the importance of molecular chirality. I am therefore particularly happy about that."
Like hands, some molecules, known as chiral molecules, can exist in “right-handed” or “left-handed” forms.
They have identical physical properties but can have very different biological properties.
"Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for chemistry.
"Their discoveries have been decisive for chemists who design reactions for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals."
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Literature prize on Thursday
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was first awarded in 1901. Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff from the Netherlands was honoured for discovering the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.
In 1911, the Frenchwoman Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, eight years after sharing the physics prize – becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two scientific fields.
The accolade in chemistry is the third of the 2026 Nobel science prizes to be awarded.
On Monday, the American psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Deisseroth and his German colleagues Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were given the honour in medicine for their work in the field of optogenetics.
Francis Halzen from Belgium won the 2026 Nobel physics prize on Tuesday for groundbreaking work using Antarctic ice to capture particles originating in the cosmos.
In addition to being one of the world’s most prestigious awards, the Nobel winner receives a diploma, a gold medal and a cheque for 12 million kronor – €1 million.
After chemistry, it will be the turn of literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics prize will bring the Nobel award season to a close on 12 October.
How light became a remote control for the brain, and won a Nobel Prize
Optogenetics, the technique that lets scientists control brain cells with light, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work in light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, a method that lays the foundation "of a new era in neuroscience", the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced on Monday.
But what exactly is optogenetics, and how did the laureates develop the technique?
Optogenetics is a method for controlling selected cells using light as a remote control. It allows scientists to switch cells on or off in a living brain and investigate how particular cells and neural circuits influence behaviour.
This new method was given the name optogenetics in 2006, but the story behind the technique began more than a decade earlier, when Peter Hegemann was studying the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas, an organism famous for swimming towards light.
Hegemann wanted to understand what makes algae move towards light. He studied its eyespot, a tiny orange dot on the cell’s surface that detects light. Through a series of experiments, Hegemann and his colleagues identified light-sensitive proteins called channelrhodopsins, which allow algae to detect light and respond to it.
Together with Georg Nagel at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, he inserted the algal genes into frog egg cells and human kidney cells and proved that channelrhodopsin was indeed a light-controlled ion channel.
When exposed to blue light, the channel opened in just 0.2 milliseconds, allowing positively charged ions to flood into the cell and generate a tiny electrical impulse.
Years later, Karl Deisseroth, the third laureate, introduced the channelrhodopsin gene into rat nerve cells. By shining blue light on the cells, they could trigger nerve signals, showing that the protein could act as a light-controlled switch. He then used the technique to control nerve cells in the brains of living mice.
For example, scientists could trigger movements in a mouse's whiskers or wake sleeping mice simply by switching on a light.
What does the future hold?
The discovery “provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in a press release.
Optogenetics is currently used primarily as a research tool. By allowing researchers to turn targeted cell types on or off using pulses of light, it enables scientists to establish direct cause-and-effect relationships between neural activity, brain function, and behaviour.
It allows researchers to map the neurons involved in emotional states such as fear, anxiety or reward. They can also map specific neural circuits governing pain, thirst, attention or aggression.
Optogenetics is also widely used in research into neurological or psychiatric conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
The science has also entered clinical trials to treat retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes blindness due to the loss of light-detecting cells in the retina.
By delivering light-sensitive opsin genes into surviving retinal cells, researchers have enabled a blind patient wearing light-emitting goggles to regain partial vision and perceive high-contrast objects.
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