On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
It's not just people who come in right- or left-handed models. Some molecules occur in two forms, called enantiomers, that differ only in the spatial arrangement of their atoms such that they are mirror images of one another. So like our hands, no matter how you twist and turn them, these molecules can't overlap and don't have the same three-dimensional structure. This property, known as chirality, has important ramifications because many biological receptors accept only one form of these molecules. What's more, the wrong form may actually do more harm than good.
This year's recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry¿William S. Knowles, Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless¿are honored for their work developing chiral molecules as catalysts. Catalysts speed up a reaction but do not get consumed. Most important, the catalysts refined by the winners heavily favor the synthesis of one enantiomer product molecule over the other. This discovery of catalytic asymmetric synthesis opened up a completely new field of research, according to the Nobel committee. For their efforts, Knowles and Noyori share half the prize, and Sharpless receives the other half.