Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday to unravel mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.

Many molecules come in versions that look similar but are not exactly the same, such as right hand and left hand. Kagan, from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry choose a side, designing reactions to produce the desired mirror image.

“The drugs we have today would not be possible without this chemistry,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.

Soai was shopping at a local supermarket when he learned he had won.

“I am very happy to receive this very good news,” Soai told the Nobel committee and reporters by telephone. “Of course, this is one of the most exciting days of my life.”

The discovery enabled most modern medicines

Mirror images of the same molecule can have different properties. For example, one version of the chemical carvone smells like mint, while the other smells like cumin, a spice often used in rye bread.

Alternative versions may also behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to choose the mirror image they get. They want a version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that makes the sniffles worse.

The Nobel committee described Kagan and Soai’s work as a feat never before achieved by anyone “other than life itself.”

“It might be difficult to say that this or that drug was developed from this,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel chemistry committee. “I would say all of them, because we use it as a tool, we use it to understand how to develop catalysts, how they work.”

In the 1980s, Kagan’s work showed that there may be a way to design reactions to produce one form of molecule rather than another. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce just one of the mirror images of a molecule, in what is now known as the Soai reaction.

“This is probably the most interesting experiment in organic chemistry,” Somfai said.

Even life prefers one mirror image to another. DNA twists to the right, and proteins in the human body are made primarily of left-handed building blocks.

In addition to developing better drugs or perfumes, deciphering the mirror images of molecules can help scientists understand the chemical architecture of life, said chemist Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the journal Science.

Kagan, 95, is affiliated with the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. Soai, 76, is affiliated with the Tokyo University of Science.

Neither university immediately responded to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

More Nobel Prizes will be awarded next week

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winner in Stockholm.

Last year, three scientists won the prize Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of new molecular structures capable of trapping large quantities of gas inside, laying the foundations for potentially sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvesting moisture from desert environments.

This year’s awards began with the Nobel Prize in Medicineassigned Monday to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help understand how the brain works. THE physics prize announced Tuesday recognized a scientist’s efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.

The literature prize will be awarded on Thursday. After Friday Peace Prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on Monday.

This year’s prize money is 12 million Swedish crowns (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, a small group of winners or an organization.

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This story has been corrected to correct that Kagan, not Soai, is 95 years old.

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Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Dazio reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalists Alexa St. John in Detroit, Catherine Gaschka in Paris and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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AP Nobel Prize: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes