Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded for Discovery of Biased Chemical Reactions

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for their discovery of chemical reactions that can produce large excesses of one form of a chemical over its mirror image. This finding addresses a long-standing challenge in origin-of-life research, where the emergence of life's selectivity for one-handed molecules remains unclear. Kagan and Soai's work demonstrates that chemical reactions can be biased, producing a predominantly one-handed outcome.