Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai win Nobel chemistry prize

French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai received the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday. Their work addressed the mystery of why nature contains only one of two possible forms of certain molecules.

Many molecules have two forms that are mirror images of each other. In nature, however, one form often predominates. This phenomenon is called homochirality, and explaining how it arises has long presented a problem for chemists.

The Nobel committee said their discoveries showed how chemical reactions could be directed toward one molecular form rather than its counterpart. It said the work has become important in fields that include pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for chemistry, said the discoveries offered a solution to a mystery more than a century old: how homochirality can arise spontaneously.

This year's Nobel Prize announcements will begin on Monday with the awarding of the medicine prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The medicine award opens this year's Nobel program.

The schedule continues with the physics prize on Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. Those awards follow Monday's medicine prize.

The peace prize will be awarded on Friday. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will then be announced on Oct. 12, following the peace award.

This year's prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor, or about $1.2 million. That amount applies whether the recipient is an individual, a small group of laureates or an organization.

Last year's medicine winners were Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi. Their discoveries concerned peripheral immune tolerance, a pathway that keeps the immune system in check so it attacks germs rather than the body's own tissues. Experts described the findings as critical to understanding autoimmune diseases including Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Nobel Prize announcements begin Monday with medicine award

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