This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two scholars who studied the 'handedness' of molecules. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Oct. 7 (local time) named Henri Kagan, 96, of Paris-Sud University in France and Kenso Soai, 76, of the Tokyo University of Science as joint winners. According to Korea's Kyunghyang Shinmun and others, they were recognized for devising ways to mass-produce only molecules facing a desired direction.

Alike as left and right hands, yet different

Some molecules, such as amino acids, can exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, like a left hand and a right hand. The chemical formula is the same, but the roles they play in the body can be entirely different, and life on Earth uses mainly one of the two forms. Picking out just one form when making molecules artificially has long been a puzzle for chemistry.

In 1986 Kagan showed that a 'nonlinear effect' can arise between a catalyst and its product, which makes it possible to obtain one form at ratios above 90 percent. In 1995 Soai designed an 'autocatalytic' reaction in which a molecule of one form acts as a catalyst for making more of the same form, and in 2003 he succeeded in mass-producing either the left- or right-handed form at will. Taiwan's United Daily News said Nobel committee chair Heiner Linke called their reaction designs remarkable.

Safer pills and a clue to life's origin

The work matters because it bears directly on drug safety. Thalidomide, used in the 1950s against morning sickness, relieved nausea in one form but caused birth defects in the other. Once it became possible to suppress the harmful form and synthesize only the helpful one, many drugs, including painkillers and cancer medicines, moved toward fewer side effects, said Ryu Do-hyun, a chemistry professor at Sungkyunkwan University.

Scholars in Taiwan pointed to cost. United Daily News quoted Hsieh Chun-chieh of Academia Sinica's Institute of Chemistry as saying the 2001 prize-winning work assumed a 100 percent pure catalyst, while this year's work reveals how catalyst purity relates to the product's form and could lower catalyst costs. The research is not yet widely used in industry, though, and scholars cautioned that the theory must mature before savings appear. The model may also help explain why living things use only one form of amino acids.

Japan's third straight year with a laureate

Soai's win gives Japan a laureate for the third year running. Last year Susumu Kitagawa (chemistry) and Shimon Sakaguchi (physiology or medicine) won, and in 2024 the atomic-bomb survivors' group Nihon Hidankyo took the peace prize. Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that Japan's chemistry laureates now number 10 and its individual laureates 31.

Japanese media sent out breaking-news alerts, and Soai received flowers at an event at his university. Wu Hsueh-liang, a professor at National Taiwan Normal University, recalled meeting Soai in Taiwan about 30 years ago and described him as a gentle scholar who kept walking a lonely path. That long years of basic research finally bore fruit carries a lesson for science communities in Korea and Taiwan as well.