Cracking Chirality: The Mystery of Mirror Molecules. Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
Director: Page Buono
Website:
Chemistry Shorts
Chirality refers to a property of molecules that come in two distinct varieties a right-handed and left-handed form. At first glance, this concept may seem like an esoteric bit of knowledge relevant only to lab chemists. However, the fact takes on a new meaning when you consider that, while chemical reactions tend to produce a 50:50 chiral mix of these molecules, the building blocks of life come in a single (or homochiral) form and indeed must for life as we know it to operate. Thats all to say, at the core of the origin of life is a mystery of homochirality.
This film from the science documentary series Chemistry Shorts explores how the groundbreaking experiments of two Harvard University scientists, S Furkan Ozturk and Dimitar Sasselov, may have cracked the case of how the prebiotic soup generated homochirality and in doing so, made life possible. Balancing the chemical nitty-gritty of it all with the larger existential questions their work probes, the film makes for a riveting dive into a potential breakthrough on one of sciences most enduring mysteries.