On October 9, 2026, Nobel Prize Outreach published its interview on the fundamental question at the heart of this year’s Chemistry prize: why life chose one mirror image of its molecules over the other. Watch the official interview below.
Video credit: Nobel Prize / Nobel Prize Outreach via its official YouTube channel. Embedded only; no footage was downloaded or re-uploaded.
The question sounds abstract until it is stated plainly. The amino acids in every protein in your body are left-handed; the sugars in your DNA are right-handed — and chemistry, left alone, produces both versions in equal measure. This year’s Chemistry laureates, Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai, were honoured for showing how a barely-there imbalance between mirror-image molecules can amplify itself into total dominance: Kagan through the mathematics of cooperative catalysis in the 1980s, Soai through his famous 1995 reaction, in which a product catalyses its own formation and a 2 percent head start becomes a 99.5 percent rout. As GlobeNews9 reported in its prize coverage, the Soai reaction remains the only known example of a molecule amplifying its own handedness in quite this way.
That is why the interview frames the prize as a contribution to life’s fundamental question. If chemistry can turn a coin-flip into a certainty on a lab bench, then somewhere in the warm, wet chemistry of the early Earth a similar tilt — a mineral surface, a crystal, a ray of polarised starlight — may have chosen the handedness every living thing now inherits.
Listening for the answer
The interview format gives the science its human register: how laureates think about a problem that connects a Parisian catalyst, a Tokyo reaction flask and the origin of life itself. GlobeNews9’s Business & Technology Desk will carry Nobel Week coverage through the December ceremonies in Stockholm.
The laureates’ own reflections on that path — from pond algae and flask chemistry to the chemistry of every living cell — are best heard in their own words above.
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