STOCKHOLM: France's Henri Kagan and Japan's Kenso Soai on Wednesday won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving the mystery of why only one form of certain molecules appears in nature, a discovery decisive for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.
The pair were honoured "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis", the jury said.
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, while the other is rarely found in nature.
The fact that only one appears is a phenomenon known as 'homochirality', the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained.
"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.
"The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular," Linke added.
Kagan, 95, is a professor emeritus at the Universite Paris-Saclay in France, while Soai, 76, is a professor at Tokyo University of Science.
Soai, who was out shopping when he received the call from Stockholm, said it was one of "the most exciting days in my life".
The academy had not been able to reach Kagan to give him the news before the announcement.
French President Emmanuel Macron congratulated him on his prize on X, calling his achievement "a tremendous source of pride for the country".
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.
"When researchers analysed what had happened, they realised that it was the active substance's mirror image that caused the harm," the academy said.
Phillip Broadwith, an editor at the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World magazine, explained that the duo's work "goes to the very fundamental level of understanding how we can control which 'hand' of a molecule we make".
Controlling "is crucial for making things like drugs or even flavours and fragrances", Broadwith said.
"It also helps to explain a possible way that all the chiral molecules on earth - our proteins, sugars and biomolecules, settled into one specific handedness rather than the other," he said in an email sent by the society. - AFP
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