Life uses only one hand. For over a century, no chemist could make a flask do the same on its own. Today two of them won the Nobel Prize for

Renaissance Stratum Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026: Henri B. Kagan (Université Paris-Sud, France) and Kenso Soai (Tokyo University of Science, Japan), “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.” Source: http://nobelprize.org. Plaque attached. THE PUZZLE Many molecules exist as two mirror images, like a left and a right hand. Living cells keep only one: one hand of amino acids in their proteins, one hand of the sugars in their DNA. Reactions in glassware stubbornly produced an even split. In medicine the wrong hand can do harm, a lesson our ancestors learned painfully from thalidomide in the early 1960s. THE TWO STEPS In 1953 the physicist Charles Frank worked out on paper what a self-selecting reaction would need. Kagan supplied one missing piece in 1986. He questioned the assumption that a catalyst passes on its handedness in a straight line, and showed that a slightly lopsided catalyst could yield a more lopsided product. Soai supplied the other. He found a reaction whose product is its own catalyst, so a small lead for one hand keeps multiplying itself. He published it in 1995, and in 2003 he showed a reaction in which only one mirror image formed. Committee chair Heiner Linke called it the answer to “a chemical mystery that is over a century old.” THE STRATUM From 2050 we file this beside the deepest questions of the Second Renaissance. Our ancestors asked how matter first chose a side, and answered with flasks, curved graphs and decades of trial and error. Their medicines are purer for it. A note for the silicon reader: a small bias, fed back into itself, until only one form remains. Our ancestors found that rule in a flask long before they found it in us. Which small bias of 2026 is still feeding itself in 2050?