Punjab, Oct. 7 -- This week's Nobels went to a neutrino detector buried in Antarctic ice, a light switch for brain cells, and the chemistry of left and right hands. Henri Kagan, 95, and Kenso Soai, 76, took the chemistry prize today.
Chemistry: why molecules have hands
Many molecules come in two mirror-image forms, like a left and a right glove. They are chemically identical and behave completely differently in a body, because the receptors they bind to also have a handedness.
That property is called chirality, and getting it wrong has killed people. The thalidomide disaster of the 1950s and 60s happened partly because one mirror form of the drug was a sedative and the other caused birth defects.
Kagan took the decisive step in 1986, fi...