Henri B. Kagan

It can be really serious though, because your body is not used to whatever the handedness that it's not built around, right? So just, uh, it, it's not used to handling that.

Uh, and so what this, uh, the last of the natural sciences to receive the Nobel Prizes for this year was chemistry in the last few days, and it's gone to Henry Kagan and Kenzo Soai.

And to q- quote the actual award, "For the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetrical organic synthesis," which is a very complicated way to s- kinda say they figured out how to make a mixture from in, of both left-handed and right-handed molecules and turn that into one or the other, where you just get pretty much exclusively right-handed or exclusively left-handed.

Which is very important for things like drug manufacturing, where you often need just one or the other and can't have the other in there.

The, where this starts is with Kagan, the first of the two people.

So any three people can win a Nobel Prize, can share it, so two got the chemistry prize this year.

Uh, and he began his work in Paris in the '80s.

Um, a- an amazing thing to be able to do, replicating what must have happened in life in a lab in a way that chemistry hadn't see- been able to do before, uh, and has, has paved the way to a whole bunch of stuff.

[ding] Fact number four.

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri Kagan from France and Kenzo Serai from Japan.

Molecules are made up of atoms that are bound together, and some molecules come in two different three-dimensional shapes that are mirror images of each other.

Even though the mirror image molecules have the same number of atoms and the same types of atoms, the two different shapes can make the chemicals behave differently.

Using IceCube, astronomers have been able to capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe, opening up a new window.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri Kagan and Kensei Soai for the discovery of nonlinear effects in autocatalysts in asymmetric organic synthesis.

All amino acids exist in two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in proteins in living cells, and the other is rarely found in nature.

And Kagan and Kenzo were able to find out how this homochirality can emerge.

... was just thinking about that.

[laughs] So, uh, first we'll talk about Henri Kagan.

He, uh, he was born on December 15, 1930.

So this man is 95 years old, about to be 96 years old, yes, i- in France, and let's talk a little bit about his contribution.

They didn't know how, and they didn't know that, you know, whether or not it was a runaway reaction.

So cut to our two Nobel laureates.

So we're gonna start with Henri Kagan.

So in the '90s, he had the, uh, chutzpah to challenge a long-held kind of universal truth that was taken for granted within the chemistry community.

Here's a look at this year's laureates.

French chemist Henri Kagan and Japanese chemist Kenzo Soai won the prize in, you guessed it, chemistry, for successfully producing just one mirror-image molecule, a process previously only seen in nature.

Stanford professor Karl Deisseroth and German professors Peter Hegemann and George Nagel won the physiology/medicine prize for their contributions to optogenetics, a technique that uses light to toggle brain cells.

Belgian-born UW Madison physicist Francis Halzen won for using Antarctic ice to catch elusive ghost particles from deep space.