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Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis—the "Soai reaction".
The Nobel Committee's Scientific Background to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 document points to a breakthrough 2020 Nature Chemistry paper by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor Scott Denmark and his research group, which proposed a detailed mechanism involving a homochiral tetramer catalyst to help solve the puzzle.