Yeah, when you put it that way it sounds pretty impresive.
But maybe someone better informed can explain... I've only heard James Tour ranting about it
Asymmetric synthesis was already well established before 1995. Chemists like Knowles, Noyori, Sharpless, and Evans could routinely produce highly enantioenriched molecules using chiral catalysts or auxiliaries.
What made Soai's reaction different was that it did not require an external chiral source. The chiral product catalyzes its own formation, so a tiny random imbalance can be amplified into a very large enantiomeric excess.
Other examples of abiotic asymmetry, such as Pasteur's crystallization experiments and circularly polarized light, were also known earlier.
So the Nobel press release is best understood as shorthand: Soai did not discover asymmetric synthesis, but demonstrated a remarkable form of self-amplifying, spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in an abiotic chemical system.
When the chirality of the product is an autocatalyst to its own chirality. So if your reaction starts off with a little more left than right due to molecular randomness, the left is an autocatalyst which means there is a runaway process and you end up at the end of the reaction with a lot more left than right.
If you repeat the reaction from scratch, it is random if you end up with a left product or a right product. But the product of your reaction is not a 50-50 mix left-right! I.e. you created asymmetry in your solution from purely symmetric solvents.
Cilia form that are tilted toward the tail of the embryo. The chirality of the protein motors driving them causes them to turn clockwise, which creates a leftward flow of water.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1180515/
https://hms.harvard.edu/news/telling-left-right-organ-develo...
Reminds me of another paper where just stirring a solution or not would determine the chirality of crystals formed and gives an idea how highly chiral environments can arise from "nothing":
Chiral symmetry breaking in sodium chlorate crystallizaton https://doi.org/10.1126/science.250.4983.975
So some random self-enriching chiral process seems much more likely to be the origin. But who knows! :)
_Qbbejnlf va gur Fnaq_
which still has my favourite life situation for a protagonist (room, board, tuition and generous stipend so long as he attends his uncle's alma mater until such time as he graduates....)
That said, would it be possible to make "right-handed" food that is safe to eat, satisfies the psychological urge to consume food in every sensory measure, but still contributes 0 calories?
(Though what you're saying is not impossible per se, I think I read an experimental proposal a while ago which suggested achieving just that, iirc by using parity violation to generate chiral photons which then initiate some kind of reaction!)
It's also still amazing to me how people first recognized this: poking around looking at the crystals that form in the bottom of a wine under a microscope, noticing that some of them were mirror images of the other, and then seperating them manually with tweezer, dissolving them into two different solutions, and demonstrating that they rotated light in opposite directions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9291139/
From that:
"To his surprise, he noticed that each crystal has a tiny facet on one of its edges oriented sometimes to the right and sometimes to the left. He could separate them by hand with a tweezer."
But I think if you are in the throes of a problem, pondering it constantly, day and night—it is in these times that an insight will make its way to your consciousness (drugs or otherwise).
Weirdly I often have dreams where I am 'solving' some problem, however on waking I realise the details are nonsense - not just the solution, but the problem itself. I think dreams are often a way to just exercise and sort memories and ideas. There is no reasoning involved.
A lot of science is just process, or multiple careful experimentation. Preparing for getting lucky is another matter.
https://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTH...
> after dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to him self: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple."
When I woke up the next day, I compiled it, ran it, and it worked on the first try (up to the stack limit on my computer... 6 function calls deep).
Since then I've noticed that if I get super-duper obsessive about things I don't understand, insights will start to pop into my head, but at the same time, I can't really talk to other people because the human interaction part of my brain is "paged out". I kind of understand tormented geniuses better knowing that many of them also walk a fine line between human life and discovery.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/popular-inf...