Sir John Warcup Cornforth was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions" and the molecular structure of cholesterol. He shared this prize with Vladimir Prelog, whose research focused on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Although profoundly deaf by the age of 20, Cornforth's research into steroids led him to discover what ultimately would prove to be a key reaction in steroid synthesis.

The press release by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on October 17, 1975 described Cornforth's Nobel Prizewinning research: "This subject is difficult to explain to the layman as it is a question of geometry in three dimensions; it is concerned with the delicate mechanism of important reactions of biological systems, where a group of atoms takes the place of a certain hydrogen atom among two or three, which may appear to be equivalent. The problem is to decide...