Holocaust survivor Henri Kagan, 95, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

On 7 October 2026 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri B. Kagan of France and Kenso Soai of Japan for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke said the two had solved a chemical mystery more than a century old. At 95, Kagan is the second-oldest person ever to receive the chemistry prize, after John Goodenough.

Many molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like left and right hands, and living things almost always use only one of them. The distinction matters enormously in medicine, because one form of a drug may heal while its mirror image does nothing or causes harm. In 1986 Kagan discovered that in certain reactions the 'handedness' of the product is not simply proportional to the purity of the catalyst used; a slightly impure catalyst can still yield a highly pure product. This non-linear effect inspired Soai, who went on to find reactions in which a small excess of one form amplifies itself. Together their work offers a plausible route by which life's single-handedness could have arisen spontaneously, and it gives chemists better control in making pure medicines.

Kagan was born in December 1930 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, into a Jewish family. During the Second World War his family survived by hiding in a village in southern France under false names. After the war he studied at the Sorbonne, earned his doctorate at the Collège de France in 1960, and built his own laboratory at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, now Paris-Saclay, where he became a full professor in 1973 and remained until retiring in 1999.

The award also corrects what many French scientists saw as a long-standing omission. Kagan shared Israel's 2001 Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless, but when those two won that year's Nobel Prize for asymmetric catalysis, Kagan was left out, prompting protests from French chemists and the research minister. Jacques Maddaluno of France's national research centre called the 2026 prize the correction of a historical injustice.