The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Henri B. Kagan and Japan’s Kenso Soai for providing a solution to the chemical mystery of life’s asymmetry.
The researchers discovered how nature exclusively makes the correct version of a molecule – rather than its mirror image.
For example, amino acid molecules, the building blocks of proteins, exist as two forms that are each other’s mirror image.
But living organisms on Earth only function with one of those forms. The Nobel laureates answered the question: Why does life favour just one of these mirror image molecules over the other.
In organic chemistry, this property is known as “chirality”, so chiral molecules have both right and left-handed forms.
You can think of them as looking like our hands – not identical, but each a mirror image of the other.
And while nature almost exclusively produces the version it requires to function, chemical reactions in a lab usually create a 50/50 mix of both left- and right-handed molecules.