The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri Karan and Kenso Soai for their discoveries of new ways to manipulate chemical reactions. For you chemists out there, the official recognition reads, “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”
Some molecules, like amino acids, exist as two variants, like your hands, that are each other’s mirror image. These mirror images reflect the fundamental chemistry of life — a state that chemists call homochiral, from the Greek words for “same” and “hand.” However, in living organisms only one of these mirror images is usually found. How this type of chemical asymmetry can occur has been a mystery to chemists for a long time. Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 for discovering a solution to this puzzle.
Laureate in literature: the Nobel medal awarded to William Butler
Yeats in 1923, with a manuscript that belonged to the poet. Photograph:
RDImages/Epics/Getty
source: William Butler Yeats – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel
Prize Outreach AB 2023. Wed. 1 Nov 2023.
<https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/speech/>
I have been all my working life indebted to the Scandinavian nation.
When I was a very young man, I spent several years writing in
collaboration with a friend the first interpretation of the philosophy
of the English poet Blake. Blake was first a disciple of your great
Swedenborg and then in violent revolt and then half in revolt, half in
discipleship. My friend and I were constantly driven to Swedenborg for
an interpretation of some obscure passage, for Blake is always in his
mystical writings extravagant, paradoxical, obscure. Yet he has had upon
the last forty years of English imaginative thought the influence which
Coleridge had upon the preceding forty; and he is always in his poetry,
often in his theories of painting, the interpreter or the antagonist of
Swedenborg. Of recent years I have gone to Swedenborg for his own sake,
and when I received your invitation to Stockholm, it was to his
biography that I went for information. Nor do I think that our Irish
theatre could have ever come into existence but for the theatre of Ibsen
and Bjørnson.
And now you have conferred upon me this great honour. Thirty years ago a
number of Irish writers met together in societies and began a
remorseless criticism of the literature of their country. It was their
dream that by freeing it from provincialism they might win for it
European recognition. I owe much to those men, still more to those who
joined our movement a few years later, and when I return to Ireland
these men and women, now growing old like myself, will see in this great
honour a fulfilment of that dream. I in my heart know how little I
might have deserved it if they had never existed.
Prior to Mr. Yeats’s speech, Einar Lönnberg, President of the Academy of Sciences, addressed the Irish writer:
Mr. Yeats – A worthier tongue than mine has already given us a review of your literary work.
What more, then, can I do on this occasion than express our
admiration and thank you for the beautiful visions you have revealed to
us from the Emerald Isle? We have delighted in listening to the tales of
the fairies and elves, with which you have made us acquainted. We have
been especially charmed by your poem about the little “silver trout”.
In another of your poems you have said:
“Time drops in decay
Like a candle burnt out” – – –
It is true, but we should be happy if this day would remain long in your memory, as it certainly will in ours.
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