中文摘要：

手性是自然界的普遍特征,并与生命现象密切相关.组成生命的许多基本物质,例如蛋白质、氨基酸和核糖核酸等均是手性化合物.同样,超过一半的药物分子都是手性化合物.因此,如何有效地发现和创造手性物质,如手性药物、手性农药、手性材料等一直是合成化学研究的焦点.经过跨世纪的追求与探索,人类终于发现人工合成的手性催化剂可以像酶一样合成手性物质.通过不懈的努力,化学家发展出了许多高效、高选择性的手性催化剂和不对称合成反应,部分手性催化剂的效率已经超越了生物酶.现在,不论是手性物质创造的多样性还是精准度都已达到了一个新的高度.手性催化剂和不对称合成反应已经在工业上得到了广泛应用,造福人类.本文将以不对称催化反应的发现、发展历程为主线,并结合我国在这一领域的研究进展,简要概述手性物质创造科学发展的昨天、今天和明天.

英文摘要：

Chirality is a fundamental characteristic of nature and pervades the world. The chiral materials closely related to our life, especially our health. The thalidomide tragedy, lessons for drug safety and regulation from the late 1950 s and the early 1960 s, indicated the importance of creating chiral materials in optically pure form. Pasteur was the first to conduct chiral resolution for the preparation of optically active molecules before 1860. Since then, scientists including chemists started to search methods for creating chiral materials like enzyme. After more than one hundred years of efforts, chemists find that the synthetic chiral catalysts（also known as artificial enzymes） catalyzed asymmetric reactions is the door to creating chiral materials. From 1970 to 2001, many efficient and selective catalytic asymmetric reactions and methods have been developed for creating chiral materials. In particular, the successes of catalytic asymmetric hydrogenations and catalytic asymmetric epoxidations and their applications in industrial preparation of chiral drugs enable this research field to won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2001. To date, tremendous amount of chiral materials such as chiral pharmaceuticals, chiral agrochemicals, chiral liquid crystals were created in a high selective and efficient manner. We now can create chiral materials like enzymes by using asymmetric catalysis with artificial enzymes as catalysts. The Chinese chemists also made great contributions for creating chiral materials, especially in the past two decades. They developed a series of highly efficient chiral ligands and catalysts including the magical chiral spiro ligands and catalysts, the privileged chiral N,N？-dioxides, as well as many original organocatalysts. These catalysts are highly efficient for a wide range of reactions involving asymmetric hydrogenation, asymmetric carbon-carbon bond formations, and asymmetric carbon-heteroatom bond formations, providing chiral alcohols, chiral amines, chiral acids, etc. Many new asymme