The work of the two researchers who have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry solved a complex puzzle of why a molecule, such as an amino acid, is found in two mirror-image forms, but living organisms build proteins using only one of them. Chemistry researchers had to find a pathway through which one of the mirror molecules could be produced in useful volumes in such fields as pharmaceuticals. A major advance in this field by Henri Kagan, now 95 and emeritus professor at the University of Paris-Sud, explained in 1986 that manipulating a catalyst could produce an excess of one of the mirror forms of the molecule based on its own chirality, or handedness. In other words, whether it was left- or right-handed in its........

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