Scientists Win Nobel Prize for 'Mirror-Image' Molecule Discovery

Researchers Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have been honored for their work on how molecules can be twins but act differently.

Some things in nature come in pairs that look exactly the same, but are actually opposites. Think of your left hand and your right hand. They look the same, but you can’t put a right-hand glove on your left hand. In science, this is called 'chirality,' or 'handedness.' Molecules can be mirror images of each other just like your hands. Scientists Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on this topic. They figured out why these mirror-image molecules are so important. This matters a lot for medicine. In the world of drugs, one 'hand' of a molecule migh…