alt Hacker NewsNobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
Comments
>Other than life itself, no one had achieved this feat.
Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty impresive.
I have to admit that when I read the intro header of the piece on the page, “They made chemistry choose a mirror image,” it struck me as LLM-speak and I immediately lost interest. I have no idea whether the authors used one to draft that phrase, which seems like an innocent summary of their contributions, but somehow I feel like if it were three years ago we would have never seen that in the title.
We have matter-antimatter asymmetry in physics... and now I just learned there's a similar concept in chemistry (one variant frequently occurs in life while the other mirrored variant is rarely found in nature)
The popular information is always a great read for non-experts! https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/popular-inf...
Cool, brings back some memories from grad school. Always found these types of reactions with self-reenforcing quite interesting.
Reminds me of another paper where just stirring a solution or not would determine the chirality of crystals formed and gives an idea how highly chiral environments can arise from "nothing":
Chiral symmetry breaking in sodium chlorate crystallizaton https://doi.org/10.1126/science.250.4983.975
Related to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life
Does this imply a parity violation (and thus that the weak force must somehow ultimately be in involved in the reaction)?
As a right-handed person, I find this deeply offensive and request all left-handed life be destroyed at once!!
That said, would it be possible to make "right-handed" food that is safe to eat, satisfies the psychological urge to consume food in every sensory measure, but still contributes 0 calories?
This is a plot point in one of my most favourite science fiction novels by Roger Zelazny... bit of a spoiler, so ROT13:
_Qbbejnlf va gur Fnaq_
which still has my favourite life situation for a protagonist (room, board, tuition and generous stipend so long as he attends his uncle's alma mater until such time as he graduates....)
For 1m I thought I would re learn chemistry. Then I remembered how diff it was at the uni.
See also this discussion about this in the sci-fi series The Expanse, where a planet has bi-chiral organisms (able to use both versions of these molecules): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/i4e187/a_small_...
Chirality is quite interesting!
[flagged]
[dead]
I remember first learning about chirality in my biochemistry course in college, and it was definitely a mind-blower. I had already started to understand that molecules had 3d structures, but the idea (and attempting to visualize it mentally) of mirror image molecules stretched my brain significantly.
It's also still amazing to me how people first recognized this: poking around looking at the crystals that form in the bottom of a wine under a microscope, noticing that some of them were mirror images of the other, and then seperating them manually with tweezer, dissolving them into two different solutions, and demonstrating that they rotated light in opposite directions.