The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenzo Soai for demonstrating how chemical reactions can be biased to produce one mirror-image form of a molecule. The work matters because life relies on only one handedness, while most ordinary reactions naturally yield a 50-50 mix of left- and right-handed forms.
Kagan, working both theoretically and experimentally, identified chiral catalysts that favored one form and by the mid-1960s had demonstrated three reactions producing an excess of a single chirality. Follow-up work showed that non-chiral additives could tune those catalysts, a control method that later became useful in pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Soai found a self-catalyzing reaction in which one chiral product promoted the formation of more of the same form. Starting with a slight excess, repeated rounds raised the excess to 90 percent. The article also connects these principles to origin-of-life research, since early chemistry may have needed a way to create environments dominated by one chiral form. The source presents a single account, so there are no differing views to reconcile.