Professor Soai of Japan, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry: “Today is the most exciting day of my life”

(Tokyo = Yonhap News) Correspondent Cho Seong-mi and Lee Do-yeon = Professor Soai Kenso of Tokyo University of Science, who won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said in his acceptance speech on the 7th, "Today is the most exciting day of my life."

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced on this day, went to Professor Soai and Professor Henri Cagan of the University of Paris South in France.

According to Japanese media such as Kyodo News and Yomiuri Shimbun, Professor Soai said on this day, "I am happy to be able to receive the award with respected Professor Henri Kagan."

“There are so many researchers in this field,” he said. “I’m really happy to receive recognition in the form of the Nobel Prize.”

When reporters asked where he heard about the award, he laughed lightly and said, "I was shopping nearby."

Professor Soai and Professor Kagang were selected as awardees for their discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.

The Nobel Committee on Chemistry evaluated the two laureates, saying, "They provided an answer to a chemical mystery that has been going on for over 100 years: 'How can homochirality (a phenomenon in which the molecules that make up living things exhibit only one direction) emerge spontaneously?'"

Some molecules, such as amino acids, exist in two halves of symmetrical left and right variants, like mirror reflections of each other. However, living organisms contain only one of these mirror image molecules. How this chemical asymmetry arises has long been a mystery to chemists.

The two winners solved the difficult problem by discovering a method to induce a chemical reaction that leads to isomorphic chirality.

In particular, in a key paper published in 1995, Professor Soai designed the so-called 'Soai reaction', the first chemical reaction in which the product itself can exhibit isomorphic chirality through an autocatalytic action that promotes the reaction.