INTERVIEW: Nobel Winner Soai Recalls Research behind Namesake Reaction

Tokyo, Oct. 10 (Jiji Press)--Kenso Soai, co-winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in an interview with Jiji Press on Friday looked back on his research that led to the discovery of the reaction now known as the "Soai reaction."

Soai, 76, a professor emeritus at Tokyo University of Science, said that, as a child, he was more interested in living things than in cars or airplanes.

He lived in Hiroshima Prefecture, western Japan, through high school. Soai was mainly interested in science subjects during his school years, choosing chemistry as his main field of study, although he also had an interest in history.

He was also fascinated by biology, which eventually led him to discover asymmetric autocatalysis, a reaction in which a tiny difference between two mirror-image molecular forms is amplified until one of them predominates. The process came to be known as the Soai reaction.

At the University of Tokyo and its graduate school, Soai studied under the late Teruaki Mukaiyama, a leading researcher in organic synthetic chemistry.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]