The shape of molecules and the 2026 Chemistry Nobel, explained using Lewis Carroll’s stories
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Before Alice steps through the mirror, she already has a chemistry question. She is in the armchair with her kitten, telling it what she imagines on the other side of the glass, and she says: “Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn’t good to drink.”
Lewis Carroll, the pen name of the Oxford mathematics lecturer Charles Dodgson, published that line in 1871. On 7 October 2026 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis”. Behind that dense sentence sits the same mirror Alice was staring into. Many molecules come in mirror-image pairs, and living systems overwhelmingly favour one handedness in some of their most important molecular building blocks.
I am a software engineer, not a chemist, so I will explain the prize the way I had to explain it to myself, with Alice as a guide. She got there first. Before she even climbs through, she has worked out the main rule of the other side: the room there is “just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way.”