Laurence David Barron FRS, FRSE (born 12 February 1944 in Southampton, England) has been Gardiner Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow since 1998 (now Emeritus).

[1] He is a chemist who has conducted pioneering research into the properties of chiral (right- or left-handed) molecules — defined by Lord Kelvin as those that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror image.

His much-cited book,[2] Molecular Light Scattering and Optical Activity, has contributed to the growing impact of chirality on many areas of modern science.

Laurence Barron attended King Edward VI School, Southampton and then studied chemistry at the Northern Polytechnic, where he earned a First Class Honours Degree of London University in 1965.

Barron developed his extension of Lord Kelvin's definition of chirality to include motion, first published in 1986, [9][10] in order to critically assess external physical influences able to induce an enantiomeric excess in reactions that would otherwise produce a racemic product, something that had been controversial ever since the time of Louis Pasteur and had resulted in many futile experiments.