The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on asymmetric catalysis, a field that underpins modern pharmaceutical manufacturing and the study of how life’s molecules came to favour one handedness over the other.
Asymmetric catalysis explains a flask. It does not explain a planet. The handedness of life is a claim, not a result. Where’s the prebiotic reactor? The chiral excess that survived? Give me numbers, not a lecture. Otherwise this is a Nobel for a very tidy hypothesis wearing a lab coat.