Chemistry Nobel honors work on steering molecules into one handed form

The prize highlights chemistry that helps explain why biology relies on one molecular handedness and why the wrong form can cause trouble.

The Chemistry Nobel recognized work showing that some reactions can be steered toward one mirror-image form of a molecule, a result that matters for how chemists think about origin-of-life chemistry and enzyme compatibility. Ars Technica says the prize went to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for finding reactions that could produce large excesses of one chiral form instead of an even split. That links directly to biology, where many molecules exist in left- or right-handed forms but living systems typically use only one. The article notes that most enzymes break down or stop working when given the wrong-handed version of a chemical.