Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Kagan and Soai for Solving a Mystery of Asymmetry in the Chemistry of Life"

A well-deserved award. Life is chiral and, in the case of many essential molecules, such as amino acids or sugars, nature has predominantly favoured one of the two possible enantiomers. How did this come about? That remains one of the great questions concerning the origin of life. And this is where the work of Kagan and Soai is so fascinating: Kagan showed that the relationship between the enantiomeric purity of a catalyst and that of the product need not be linear, and that small differences in chirality can be amplified in surprising ways. Soai took this amplification to an extraordinary level through asymmetric autocatalysis, in which the product itself catalyses its own formation, making it possible for an initially almost negligible difference between two enantiomers to ultimately result in practically just one. A spectacular example of how something very small can end up making a huge difference.