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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.” Some molecules, such as amino acids, exist as two variants that are each other’s mirror image. However, living organisms only contain one of these mirror images. How chemical asymmetry such as this could have emerged was long a mystery to chemists. Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 for discovering a solution to this puzzle. Life’s chemistry is what chemists call homochiral, after the Greek words for “same” and “hand”. Like hands, all amino acids exist as two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in the proteins in your cells. The other is rarely found in nature. For a long time, chemists wondered how homochirality can emerge. When they began to experiment with chemical reactions that can form two mirrored molecules, they always obtained