  Parity violation (PV) effects in chiral molecules have so far never been
experimentally observed. To take this challenge up, a consortium of physicists,
chemists, theoreticians and spectroscopists has been established and aims at
measuring PV energy differences between two enantiomers by using
high-resolution laser spectroscopy. In this article, we present our common
strategy to reach this goal, the progress accomplished in the diverse areas,
and point out directions for future PV observations. The work of Andr\'e Collet
on bromochlorofluoromethane enantiomers, their synthesis and their chiral
recognition by cryptophanes made feasible the first generation of experiments
presented in this paper.
