French Holocaust survivor wins 2026 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

A Holocaust survivor whose family escaped the Nazis by hiding in a French village under assumed names has been announced as one of two winners of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Henri B. Kagan, who was born in France in 1930, was chosen as a Nobel Laureate alongside Kenso Soai, for their groundbreaking work in the field of pharmaceutical engineering. Conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, their respective research helped solve the problem of how to create a single molecular mirror image.

A press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for choosing the Nobel Laureates, described how “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 equal proportions of both in their test tubes. However, chemists strived to produce only one of these mirror images, because in the development of molecules that will interact with living beings – such as in pharmaceuticals – only one mirror image will have the desired effect.”

Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said that “Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular.”

After the war, Kagan went on to receive a PhD from the Collège de France, and then went on to become a professor at what was then Université Paris-Sud, France.

Kagan, 95, shared Israel’s 2001 Wolf Prize in Chemistry with Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless – however, while Noyori and Sharpless won that year’s Chemistry Nobel alongside a third man, William S Knowles, Kagan did not share it.

Jacques Maddaluno, an emeritus researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and former director of its Institute of Chemistry, told Le Monde that the French scientific community was “extremely happy” that Kagan had finally been recognised after his achievements had been overlooked a quarter of a century before. “This corrects a historical injustice,” he said.

As in previous years, 12 million Swedish kronor (approximately £980,000) will be shared equally between the laureates.