Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 Explained: Mirror Molecules (EP 63)

Why does life favor one molecular mirror image? The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary unpack the science from first principles: chirality, Pasteur's crystals, enantiomeric excess, and how a tiny imbalance can grow into an overwhelming preference for one molecular hand. We connect Kagan's catalyst discoveries and the Soai reaction to medicines, the origins of biological handedness, and the serious concerns around hypothetical mirror life. Plus: symmetry in physics, Frances Oldham Kelsey and thalidomide, and our interpretation of a Nobel illustration. CHAPTERS 00:00 Why life has a molecular handedness 01:33 Hello Internet 02:49 The 2026 Chemistry laureates 06:24 Chirality and mirror-image molecules 12:10 Pasteur and the history of handedness 19:36 Why is life's chemistry one-handed? 24:35 Frank and the origin-of-life puzzle 29:14 Enantiomeric excess explained 30:30 Kagan and nonlinear effects 38:58 FFP and symmetry in physics 42:20 Soai and asymmetric autocatalysis 51:28 Why chirality matters for medicine 58:21 What this does and does not explain about life 1:00:25 Mirror life and biological risk 1:10:37 Examining the Nobel illustration 1:14:10 Recap and Nobel week reflections RESEARCH & FURTHER READING Original papers and supporting context: Frank's model (1953): https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-3002(53)90082-1 Puchot, Kagan et al. (1986): https://doi.org/10.1021/ja00269a036 Soai et al. (1995): https://doi.org/10.1038/378767a0 Sato et al., amplification (2003): https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.200390105 Mirror-life risks (2024): https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9158 Nobel announcement: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2026/press-release/ EDITORIAL NOTES Intro: the 50:50 example describes an unbiased synthesis, not all chemistry. The Soai reaction is a clue to amplification, not proof of how life began. On-screen clarifications: 04:38 B-DNA is right-handed; Z-DNA can form a left-handed helix. 13:56 Pasteur separated sodium ammonium tartrate crystals. 18:48 L/D configuration does not specify optical rotation. 19:10 Proteins mainly use L-amino acids; DNA/RNA use D-sugars. 22:55 Mentos mainly triggers CO2 bubble nucleation. 27:18 Asymmetric catalysis and autocatalysis are distinct. 34:07 0.25 × 0.25 = 0.0625 = 6.25%. 36:31 Inactive mixed catalyst pairs are a simplified model. 37:55 The normalized product-ratio curve need not be parabolic. 42:04 Wu: preferential emission opposite spin; antineutrinos also emitted. 45:30 5-pyrimidyl alkanol; an alkanol is an alcohol. 47:10 The tiny-imbalance result is Sato et al. (2003), cited above. 47:40 A demonstration of symmetry breaking by asymmetric autocatalysis. 49:09 Above 99.5% ee means above 99.75% majority form, not exactly 100%. 49:57 0.00005% excess is 1 part in 2,000,000. 52:44 Thalidomide enantiomers interconvert in the body. 53:36 Merrell applied in the U. S.; Kelsey withheld approval. Trial exposure occurred. 1:02:09 Mirror-life catastrophe is a serious risk, not an observed outcome. 1:03:28 Antibodies are adaptive immunity, not innate immunity. 1:03:53 Impaired recognition does not mean proven total immune invisibility. 1:04:27 Some treatments might work; ecosystem protection is very difficult. 1:04:56 No reproducing mirror organism has been reported. 1:09:19 Chimeras and genetic modification are not interchangeable. 1:10:37 The Nobel-diagram critique is our interpretation, not an official correction. 1:11:51 Solid wedge: toward; hashed wedge: away; ordinary line: neither. WATCH & FOLLOW Full video: https://youtu.be/Wdapv1hFT4w Episode notes: https://ffppod.com/episodes/ep63 Follow @FFPPod on Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook. Breaking down science news so it makes sense to curious people everywhere.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Lester Nare?

  A chemist in Paris and a chemist in Tokyo who cracked one of life's oddest habits. Look at your hands. Mirror images. But a left glove won't fit your right hand. Many molecules come in left and right versions, too. One smells like spearmint. Its mirror twin smells like rye bread. But chemistry in a flask always makes both. Fifty fifty. In 1986, Henri Cagan found something odd. A catalyst that was only a little right-handed made products that were mostly right-handed.

• 0:45Lester Nare?

  Picture six right-handers and four lefties on a dance floor. Each lefty pairs off with a right-hander and sits down. Who's still dancing? Only right-handers. Then, Kenzo Soai built a molecule that copies itself, hand and all, like a rumor that spreads. A head start of one molecule in 2 million became more than 99% in just three rounds. Life builds itself from just one hand. This is a clue to how that happened and a sharper way to make medicines. And this is the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• 1:33Lester Nare?

  Hello, Internet. This is your captain speaking, Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary. We are on day three and our final day of Nobel Prize week. We are going to go from the search for ghostly particles in Antarctica to the winner of the Chemistry Nobel Prize. And this one is interesting and it reminds me of one of my favorite episodes that we did at the end of last year. We have left and right hands. And similarly, there are left and right molecules.

• 2:17Lester Nare?

  But life overwhelmingly prefers one specific type. Today's prize is about how chemistry can make that asymmetry happen. It connects the way we make medicines to a much older question. Why did life settle on particular molecular building blocks in the first place? This is going to be interesting. As always, we are going to talk about the science from the ground up today, starting with who won?

• 2:49Krishna Choudhary?

  The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henri B. Cagan of the former university Paris Sud in France and Kenzo Soai of Tokyo University of Science in Japan. And the official citation is "For the discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis."

• 3:14Lester Nare?

  Talk about a mouthful.

• 3:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, but by the end of the episode, we will have unpacked that statement. And there's a hint in the words nonlinear and asymmetric autocatalysis. For anyone familiar with biochemistry, this should immediately ring a bell because that's kind of what life is. Okay, it's a nonlinear phenomenon because reproduction happens. And if you've ever seen the bacterium sort of expand in a Petri dish from one, you get two to four to eight. And there's this doubling factor. So obviously, that's nonlinear. And it's a kind of autocatalysis because it's a bunch of chemical reactions that make themselves, right? The DNA makes more DNA, makes more DNA. Obviously, there are multiple steps in the process.

• 3:58Krishna Choudhary?

  But at the end of the day, life is nonlinear and it is autocatalysis. It's also asymmetric because of the kinds of molecules that life prefers. Even though the molecules in life can exist in symmetric parts, life is remarkably consistent with which one it uses. DNA is a great example of this. DNA is right-handed, meaning if I were to put my thumb on the axis of a DNA molecule, the curve is always the way that my fingers wrap around. It's always going to go right-handed, sort of clockwise, if I were looking up the axis of DNA. But you can make DNA that is left-handed, right? It's just that life never does it.

• 4:41Krishna Choudhary?

  So the two Laureate's contributions fit together here because Cagan showed that a small imbalance in a catalyst can produce a substantially greater imbalance in the product. If you start out with a little bit more right-handed than left-handed, then you can make that nonlinear effect. And Soai found a reaction in which the product becomes the catalyst for making more product. That's that autocatalysis part.

• 5:08Lester Nare?

  Okay, so before we unpack the chemistry, what is the surprising part here? Why wouldn't a small advantage naturally just become a big advantage?

• 5:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, and that's actually what I was asking when I was researching this kind of stuff. It turns out that making more material and increasing its purity are two different achievements. Okay, so if you repeatedly double, let's say you've got a mixture of 51, 49, okay? But the 51% of molecules start making their own version and the 49% make their own version. The ratio is going to remain exactly the same, right? So there's something in the chemistry that has to favor the majority disproportionately for the imbalance to grow. And that is what this Nobel Prize is about. That's the key distinction.

• 6:00Krishna Choudhary?

  It matters for making useful molecules, including pharmaceutical intermediates. It also gives us an experimental way to investigate the holy grail of biochemistry, which is how a world of molecules, an abiotic world, without a consistent handedness, could give rise to the life that we have on the planet Earth, which is all one particular handedness.

• 6:25Lester Nare?

  So we've talked a lot about handedness. And it's not just an analogy. So what does it mean for a molecule to be left or right-handed?

• 6:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we went into detail with our Yang Mills episode, but we'll do it again. So let's hold our hands. This is my left hand. This is my right hand. There is no transformation that I can do to my right hand, like rotating-wise, that will give me my left hand. Even if I rotate it, right? Sure, they meet up to form like a prayer hand or a clap. But these are two separate things, right? Because in this case, the hand is facing me, the thumb is to the left, but the hand is facing me, my palm is facing me. And here, the back of my hand is facing me, the front is facing the camera. So even though the thumb is pointing in the same direction, these are not the same, right?

• 7:21Krishna Choudhary?

  So it requires this 3D point of view to really understand this. And the chemistry world has a word for this. It's called chirality from the Greek word for hand. And so we would say that our hands are chiral, okay? Now let's look at some of the building blocks of life itself. This is alanine. It's an amino acid. Sometimes you can buy it in a powder if you want to like get swol or whatever, right? And on the left-hand side, we see the chemical diagram of this thing. There's a carbon at the center. It's an amino acid, so it's got an amine group and NH2 to its left, a carboxyl group to its right. That's a COOH. And then the R group, which is the thing that changes for every single amino acid.

• 8:06Krishna Choudhary?

  In this case, it's just a methyl group, CH3. If you look at that diagram itself, you don't find anything funny. But if you look at the 3D picture, you find that there are two versions, okay? There is the left-handed alanine and the right-handed alanine, which in chemistry they call D-alanine. L-alanine is the left-hand version. And these are chiral molecules because there's just how with our hand, there's no way to rotate one hand to make it the other. There's no way to rotate the right-handed enantiomer, which is the right-handed version of this molecule, to make it the left. It's the same atoms. It's the same bonds even, right?

• 8:47Krishna Choudhary?

  The carbons are bonded to the oxygen in exactly the same way and the nitrogen in exactly the same way. But in one case, the oxygen is coming out of the page and in the other case, the oxygen is going into the page. Just like how like our hands, in one case, the palm is facing me, but in the other case, the back of my hand is facing me. Right? This is what we talk about when we're talking about mirror image molecules and why they're chemically alike in some environments, but in other environments, you can actually distinguish them. And that last detail is what matters. If you look at the left-hand side, the flat diagram does not give you the information. You need the 3D information to distinguish between the left and the right-handed version.

• 9:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, now, not everything in life is chiral. You can have achiral molecules. For example, there is the glycerol molecule, which is just carbons with a bunch of OH groups attached. That is achiral. If I take a mirror image of that, it's the same. Fatty acids like beturic acid, again, if I take a mirror image of that, it's going to be exactly the same. Glucose, on the other hand, is chiral. So it's ribose. That's why actually DNA and RNA have a particular handedness. Because ribonucleic acid in RNA, we only use a particular handedness and that's what causes the spiral.

• 10:12Krishna Choudhary?

  Deoxyribose, again, has a particular handedness, in this case, right-handed, which is why DNA is right-handed. So in biology, you have a mixture of both. But this has crucial implications for biochemistry in general. Because imagine trying to fit a right-handed glove into your left hand. It's just not going to work, right? And this has implications in biochemistry because the glove, you can imagine, is an enzyme that has a particular handedness and it is expecting the same handedness of whatever thing that it's going to bind to, right? If you give it the other handedness, things are going to get funny.

• 10:57Krishna Choudhary?

  One of the big implications of this is, for example, the left-handed Carvone, which is the odor that we get from spearmint, right? We've got a photo of that where we show the left-handed version of Carvone.

• 11:13Krishna Choudhary?

  Is how we get spearmint. That's the odor that we get from, you know, when we, when we smell mint. The right-handed version of the same molecule. Our receptors in our nose get confused. They start smelling something completely different. It's the odor of caraway. The same chemistry, the same, I shouldn't say the same chemistry. The chemist will get mad. The same atoms, the same arrangement of atoms. But in the 3D world, they look entirely different because they are mirror images. And that has an effect on how we actually sense.

• 11:48Lester Nare?

  This is fascinating.

• 11:49Krishna Choudhary?

  This molecule, right? And so these two forms, they differ in activity, metabolism, side effects. Sometimes both are useful, sometimes not. And the point is that their behavior can be measured and you can infer it by looking at their activity.

• 12:05Lester Nare?

  This is, this is incredible. And, and so I think the, the next natural question here, now that we kind of understand this idea of handedness, especially that you can look at a 2D diagram versus a 3D diagram. And there's different implications based on how you're looking at it. How did we in chemistry even get to the point where we discovered this idea of left and right-handedness?

• 12:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I mean, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in this year, 2026. The results form from a long chain of ideas, as is classic in all of science. And the first result really goes back to the mid 19th century. It all began with Louis Pasteur. He was investigating a substance that is important for wine production. We all like wine here in California. He was investigating tartaric acid. He was French, so obviously, you know, they're obsessed with wines. Let me just say, it's been shown in international competitions that California wines are better than French wines.

• 13:05Lester Nare?

  I heard he's from the French region of Tartaria.

• 13:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Is that a thing? No, it should be. But in any case, tartaric acid is the stuff that you might recognize from wine diamonds. This is the like particulates that kind of settle at the bottom of a glass. Or sometimes they form in the cork, as you see on the upper right-hand side. These are little crystals of potassium bipartite. And they take on the form, they take on the color of whatever wine is in there. They're little, they're harmless and sometimes they're actually manufactured in wine barrels. Because like they'll, they'll settle at the bottom, right? Now Louis Pasteur heard about tartaric acid. And his colleagues said that sometimes they bent polarized light to the right.

• 13:53Krishna Choudhary?

  And sometimes the crystals bent polarized light to the left. And that really piqued his interest. So he grew crystals of tartaric acid and examined them under a microscope. And he discovered they exist in two different variants. On the left-hand side, we actually see some of the drawings that he made of these crystals. And you can see they're mirror images of one another. So the crystals themselves came in these two different forms. And one of the, you know, geniuses of Louis Pasteur is to look under the microscope and notice that difference.

• 14:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, under a microscope, like it's very easy to be like, oh, they're the same crystal. But the mind of Louis Pasteur, the genius that he was, he noticed that subtle difference. That actually, if you, if you arrange them, because like in the drawing, they come out in this nice arrangement, right? But that's because he's drawing it that way. Presumably on the Petri dish where he's looking under the microscope, they're in all these different arrangements. And he was able to notice, right? With a light microscope that there are these two versions. And there we have actually the Louis Pasteur Institute still has little vials of the bipartite that he made in, in these vials, which is, which is absolutely incredible, right? So he discovered that there's these two variants, each that are mirror images.

• 15:11Krishna Choudhary?

  And then using little tweezers, he separated out samples of one-handedness and samples of another-handedness. But this is at the aggregate crystal level, okay? Now from that aggregate crystal, he dissolved each thing in liquids. And he found that one of them went bent light to the right. And the other one bent light to the left. This is a classic experiment that we see in, like, when we talk about chirality and molecules that are chiral. What you do is you have a light source that brings out unpolarized light. Unpolarized light, meaning the electric field of your light wave is in every direction. You put that through a polarizer, which is like the stuff, you know, the sunglasses that we have with the polarized sunglasses.

• 15:56Krishna Choudhary?

  That's literally a polarizing filter that selects for a particular orientation of electromagnetic field. Like the light is, you know, oscillating in all these different directions. And the polarizer preferentially selects one particular orientation. So now that you have polarized light that's gone through this set of glasses. You put that through your sample, which is a dissolved liquid that has either the left-hand side version of the crystal or the right-hand side version of the crystal. And what he noticed was the axis of polarization would rotate as the light propagated through the medium. And you can tell that by putting another polarizer on the right-hand side and seeing how much comes out.

• 16:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Depending on the angle, you would get a lot of absorption or not absorption at all.

• 16:42Lester Nare?

  This is interesting. It's both kind of like a control mechanism on the left-hand side is the polarizer. And then like a sensor on the right-hand side as an analyzer.

• 16:49Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And this is a classic experiment now that we use in a lot of chemistry labs. The striking part is that the distinction between the left and right crystals survived dissolving stuff into the liquid and then putting it into this polarizer. Okay, so that's telling you that the things that make up the crystal have that property of left and right-handedness. This was the key observation.

• 17:14Lester Nare?

  It's not an artifact of the experimental setup.

• 17:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like the crystal is growing in some weird, you know, like the left-hand side of the Petri dish has some temperature and the right-hand side. No, it's like literally the, the things that make up this crystal are left and right-handed, right? And this property matters because when it came to these tartaric crystal molecules, the next experiment that he did was whether bacteria preferred one or the other. And he saw that indeed they did. This was in 1857. He investigated what happened if bacteria fermented on tartaric acid preferred, you know, growth on one medium versus the other. He saw that bacteria willingly fermented.

• 17:55Krishna Choudhary?

  The bacteria were great at eating one particular type of tartaric acid. This is the same type that was found in grapes and found in wine bottles. But the other type, they did not eat at all. The bacteria did not grow at all. And this is the first indication that life's chemistry is somehow chiral.

• 18:16Lester Nare?

  So Pasteur kind of started this process by separating these different types of crystals, which are at a macro size level.

• 18:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Lester Nare?

  Because they had some differences in it. But the thing he really discovered was this underlying property of what would have been at the time, these invisible molecules.

• 18:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And at that point, you know, atomic theory was new. Like there wasn't really a sense of like atoms and molecules in the sense that we now take for granted, right? But that was the key conceptual leap. And later, when researchers began studying life's building blocks, they discovered that naturally occurring amino acids all bend polarized light to the left. So all of the naturally occurring amino acids, you dissolve them into a solution. The polarized light always bends towards the left. And this is where we get left-handed amino acids like alanine that we were talking about earlier, leucine, valine, every single amino acid that is chiral. Life uses only a particular type of chirality. And that's why we call life homo chirality.

• 19:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Because homo is the same, chirality meaning this handedness. The subsequent experiments in sugars found that DNA elixirs the opposite. It's actually right-handed and the sugars are actually right-handed. And that's because the glove kind of fits the, you know, the enzymes fit the right-handed version, things like that. And this insight is, is pretty incredible, right? And the next question obviously is what happened at the dawn of life to make life's chemistry one-handed?

• 19:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Because Pasteur was able to create both versions in his lab, right? If you grow tartaric acid abiotically, you'll get both versions of the crystal. But everywhere that we see in life, they prefer only one-handedness. And when, when we, when you try to figure that out, the, the main question is why do living organisms only use one mirror image of the amino acids? Like, how can this preference even arise? Now, some chemists just claim that chiral chemistry is unique to life, right? Maybe it could be that like, there's like, you know, some woo-woo thing.

• 20:19Lester Nare?

  Hand wavy.

• 20:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, hand wavy woo-woo thing of like vitalism, where like the life has some like force, right? That is beyond the laws of physics as of now that we haven't seen. But in the 1900s, a German chemist, Willy Markwald, he showed that no, I can actually make a reaction that prefers one way or the other. This is the first time that we've found a reaction like this. He used a catalyst. A catalyst is basically an intermediary in a chemical reaction that facilitates a chemical reaction. He figured out that actually if the catalyst itself has a particular handedness,

• 21:00Krishna Choudhary?

  then it will prefer to make products of, of that same handedness versus the other handedness. Well, sometimes the other way around. But in any case, you've got two different products that you can make, the left and the right-handed version. If the thing that is making the product is itself right or left-handed, then you can skew the chances one way or the other, right? And this, this particular experiment here, this is from the Nobel Committee, the visualizations that they put out. Here, the key thing is you've got a metal ion that is marked M in black that is associated with a chiral molecule. And then that thing attaches to a substrate. And

• 21:44Krishna Choudhary?

  That entire complex starts creating one particular side of products versus the other. Right? Now, in this case, both are being created, but one is preferred over the other. In physical terms, what this really means is that both pathways have different activation energies. We've got a little diagram that kind of shows this where if we, if we talk about reaction progress on the x-axis.

• 22:12Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 22:13Krishna Choudhary?

  That means like, you know, going from reactants to products, you can think about it as a time axis. It's not exactly, but let's just say for, for this visual, it's a time axis. The Gibbs free energy is on the y-axis. That tells you effectively, what is the energy of the chemicals that are involved here? The reactants have a higher energy and the products have a lower energy. That's why, just like in physics, you go from high to low energy. But in order to get there, you have to go through this hill, which is the activation energy. That's why every time you put reactants into a, into a vial, they're not going to immediately go to products. A lot of times they're going to stay reactants because you have this energy barrier.

• 22:53Lester Nare?

  When I put my Mentos into my Coca-Cola, it doesn't immediately explode. There's a little buffer time.

• 22:58Krishna Choudhary?

  There's a little buffer time and that's because, you know, the jiggling is getting over that activation energy. But as you know, the, the stuff is a runaway reaction because the jiggling creates higher temperature, which then creates more jiggling, which creates more jiggling. And so more and more stuff go over the activation energy. What, what's happening with the, the chiral catalyst is that the activation energy is decreased for the ones that are preferred, like the, let's say the right-hand side has a lower activation than the left-hand side. Because the catalyst is preferring that one over the other. And that's why there's more right-hand side reactants or products, I should say, versus the other. Right? There's more right-hand side products versus the other because the activation energy is lowered. Because that catalyst itself is right or left-handed.

• 23:44Lester Nare?

  Depending on its handedness of the catalyst, it requires the, the entry point for the end product of that same handedness has a lower barrier to entry.

• 23:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And this was in the early 1900s. The difference was small, but the mere existence of it is revolutionary. Because this means that it's not just life. We can create organic stuff in our Petri dish, in our vial, that creates this asymmetry.

• 24:11Lester Nare?

  So there's, there's the potential, you're saying there's a chance.

• 24:14Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 24:14Lester Nare?

  The woo-woo, it's not the vitality.

• 24:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Lester Nare?

  And there's a way to fundamentally understand what life is doing to make it homo chiral. Like this is now where we are like, okay, there's, there's a path.

• 24:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Lester Nare?

  That we can go down.

• 24:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 24:29Lester Nare?

  To understand that fundamental question.

• 24:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And this is where the theoretical physicists come in.

• 24:33Lester Nare?

  Oh, yes.

• 24:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? This brings us to 1953. There's a article by Charles Frank from the University of Bristol. I should say, sir, Charles Frank, because he was knighted. He's a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is a theoretical physicist who, a colleague describes to him the fact that chemistry and chemists can't really understand why life's asymmetry arose. And maybe a mathematical solution, or like at least a roadmap to understanding this problem would be nice. And so Charles Frank writes this paper and it's, it's kind of a, it's a classic like theoretical physicist paper of like, this is trivial.

• 25:15Krishna Choudhary?

  He's the kind of theoretical physicist that everyone hates, especially the experimentalist. Okay? Like in, in his, um, in his introduction, he talks about how like, you know, this is, this is, guys.

• 25:30Lester Nare?

  Why are you wasting my time?

• 25:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and he, he responds with three categories that we need to establish in order to make something like an asymmetry like this happen. The first one is that there is a chiral catalyst and an asymmetric reaction. That's the kind that was, um, that we had just discussed from Willie Markwald. The second stipulation is that the formation of one of the mirror images is somehow enhanced and the other is dampened. This means that there's an inhibition of types. Okay? You're not just making both. Somehow the presence of one is making the other one worse. Okay? And the third is that the chemical reaction has to form the catalyst itself. You need a runaway reaction.

• 26:16Krishna Choudhary?

  You need the product itself to go back into the reaction and feed in. So you get this nonlinear effect. So he's, he's putting out a roadmap. Okay? That last part is called autocatalysis and that's the self-reinforcing effect. And Frank concludes his report by just laconically noting that a laboratory demonstration may not be impossible. Like really?

• 26:38Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Krishna Choudhary?

  This is, this is, this is something that classic theoretical physicists do. It's like, oh, why don't you just, why don't you just figure it out?

• 26:46Lester Nare?

  Just go do it.

• 26:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Lester Nare?

  Like, what are you asking me for?

• 26:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. It's like, oh, really? Okay, nice. Well, his, his, his paper does make waves because now we've got kind of a roadmap.

• 26:56Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Krishna Choudhary?

  On how to get there, right? And it's spread widely among chemists. It becomes kind of a chemical puzzle that university lecturers present to their students. Like this is an open problem. Let's see if you guys can figure it out. Now, Markwald, as I said, had already succeeded in the first condition at the start of the 20th century. And autocatalysis, asymmetric catalysis, is also something that has been figured out. The 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized William Knowles, Rioji Noori and Barry Sharplis for important chiral catalytic reactions. This is the autocatalysis that we're talking about. And, um, that led to the industrial route to L-Dopa,

• 27:40Krishna Choudhary?

  which is a pharmaceutical that's used pretty widely. And in 2021, the Nobel Prize recognized Benjamin List and our favorite chemist on the podcast, David McMillan from Princeton University.

• 27:52Lester Nare?

  Go Tigers.

• 27:54Krishna Choudhary?

  They created asymmetric organocatalysis. So organic chemistry that preferred one way or the other, right?

• 28:05Krishna Choudhary?

  All of that is fine. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year recognizes the fulfillment of the remaining two conditions. Meaning you need inhibition and you need that inhibition paired with catalysis. This runaway reaction. Okay?

• 28:21Lester Nare?

  We big, so and just, so in nature, there's this 50/50 thing where it happens naturally, where it's not asymmetric.

• 28:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Lester Nare?

  And through 2021, we had all of these different ways to artificially create an asymmetry. But the thing was to fulfill sort of the ultimate vision. We still had two missing variables.

• 28:42Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Lester Nare?

  And, and those specifically are the difference between the past Nobel Prizes and this Nobel Prize.

• 28:48Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. In this particular Nobel Prize, we are establishing the nonlinear effect, which is this, this sort of property that like, I can get more asymmetry from, uh, underlying asymmetry. And the fact that we can have a runaway reaction, that autocatalysis part. Okay? So to make that question measurable, there's one scientific sort of,

• 29:14Krishna Choudhary?

  there's one scientific like parameter that I need to introduce to everyone. And this is the idea of an anti-omeric excess abbreviated EE. This is the difference between the amount of left-handed stuff and the amount of right-handed stuff. If I have exactly 50% left and right, that's a 0% excess, right? Because I have exactly the same. If I have all of 1%, all of one type, if I have all of like left-handed and no right-handed, that means I have 100% excess of left-handed stuff. Right? This is a key thing, a key parameter that we're going to have to deal with as we move on. Okay? So a 50/50 mixture, that's a zero.

• 29:57Krishna Choudhary?

  If I have a 60/40 mixture, that's a 20% excess. Because it's really the difference between how much of one I have and how much of the other I have. And that distinction is essential as we get to talking about how a small starting imbalance is going to create a large ending imbalance.

• 30:16Lester Nare?

  So 2% excess is almost a coin flip?

• 30:20Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Lester Nare?

  And then 50, 51, 49 of the other.

• 30:24Krishna Choudhary?

  That's 2%.

• 30:25Lester Nare?

  That's 2%.

• 30:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. And that's almost a coin flip.

• 30:27Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 30:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Lester Nare?

  Okay, okay.

• 30:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Lester Nare?

  So I think we now are getting to our Nobel laureates.

• 30:36Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 30:36Lester Nare?

  We know the setup and, you know, as a fan of Thierry Henry, the French footballer, although he was an Arsenal player, this is a Chelsea house. We will start with, uh, Henri Cagan. And so what was it that he discovered as a part of now this setup we've created?

• 30:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. So now we get to our actual Nobel laureates.

• 31:01Krishna Choudhary?

  Henri Cagan tries to tackle the nonlinear part.

• 31:04Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 31:05Krishna Choudhary?

  Of the Nobel description, okay? Let's suppose that we start with a pure right-handed catalyst that favors right-handed products. Right? Um, Markwald has already shown that, that like, if you start with, like the catalyst itself has a particular geometry, then the products are going to favor some particular geometry. Okay? So let's say the right-handed catalyst favors the right-handed product and the left-handed catalyst favors the left-handed product. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that if each of these catalysts work independently, then if I start out with, let's say, a 60/40 mixture of catalysts, the ending reactants are also going to be 60/40. Because 60% of the catalyst created the 60% products.

• 31:48Krishna Choudhary?

  The 40% of the right-handed stuff created the 40%. And the ratio is going to remain the same. Right? The slope in this case is going to be one. Like if I start out with some ratio, I'm going to end up with some ratio. The slope could also be something different. For example, like, you know, if I start out with 60%, I could end up with 30% of something. But the, the, the line is going to be linear. Because maybe like, you know, there's some like weird effect that happens and like, one, one, one type goes, goes one way and the other type goes the other way. The line, if I increase the asymmetry on the catalyst side, I will just only linearly increase the asymmetry on the reactant side. Okay? Because these things are working independently.

• 32:31Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 32:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? That is the assumption that Cagan starts to question.

• 32:36Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 32:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? Everyone believed this at the time. Cagan's like, well, you know, um, if you think about the catalyst itself, we don't actually know how it works. Okay? And during a chemical reaction, we've got this metal atom, right? That's like doing a lot of the work. But the metal atom could be doing different things if there are multiple.

• 32:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Agents involved, okay? Metal atoms normally react and interact with several molecules simultaneously. They're not just like, oh, I'm gonna stick to this guy. They're recruiting all sorts of other stuff. And that's why like metals like zinc and things like that are very important for our body as cofactors, because they actually help proteins recruit all sorts of other types of stuff. Now, here's what, here's, here's what he considers, right? Suppose we've got two chiral molecules that are catalysts. There's a left-handed version and a right-handed version, and we combine it with a metal atom, right? Now, this metal atom is gonna recruit two of these to create mixtures. So we're gonna get three possibilities.

• 33:43Krishna Choudhary?

  We're gonna get a right-right mixture, a left-right mixture, and then a left-left mixture, right? But because of combinatorics, if I start out with a certain asymmetry, that asymmetry is only going to grow because of my mixtures. For example, if I start out with 25% and 75%, I'm gonna end up with 6% and 56%. Like, if I start out with 25% left, the combinatorics there is gonna be 0.25 squared, which is gonna be 0.625. So these guys are rounding to...

• 34:18Lester Nare?

  Boo.

• 34:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, they should say 6.25%, but this is the popular information, and they don't wanna deal with decimals like for the plebes. But it should really be 6.25%, you know? If you guys are taking the GRE, don't round.

• 34:32Lester Nare?

  Don't do that.

• 34:34Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so you get 6.25% of the left-hand side. You get something like, I think it's 56.25% or, I don't know what the, you know what I mean? Of the right-right. And then the mixture is gonna be about 38%. It's really 37. something, something percent. But that's the key distinction now, right? So you've made these mixtures of molecules that have a different ratio than what you started.

• 34:59Lester Nare?

  It's not that same linear ratio we just talked about previously.

• 35:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly. And now, if you create this type of multi-molecular interaction, and you try to run your reaction through, what are the products going to look like? This is the big paper that comes out in 1986 in the Journal of Chemical Society, the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He shows that actually, for a particular type of reaction called the Sharplis epoxidation of geraniol, which is depicted on the, on the lower there, we don't get a line. We get a nonlinear effect. If I increase the amount of asymmetry, or I increase like, you know,

• 35:45Krishna Choudhary?

  the amount of right-handed versus left-handed, I don't get a straight line. I actually get a difference. I get a slope that is very, very much a nonlinear effect. The, the type of reaction here is the Sharplis epoxidation. That's named after Barry Sharplis, who won the Nobel Prize in 2001. So this is building on some of the asymmetric oxidation stuff that Barry Sharplis had done earlier on. The left-right catalyst behaves differently. And that is the key distinction that he's trying to make. So theoretically, what's happening, he actually tries and figures it out. Now we have the complete picture, right? We've created these left-right catalysts, and we've created the left-left and the right-left.

• 36:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Sorry, left-left and the right-right, right? What ends up happening is the left-right catalyst, the mixture, can't do anything. It is, it is completely useless.

• 36:40Lester Nare?

  And inert?

• 36:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, in some sense, yeah. It's, it can't react with anything because, and I guess, you know, it's getting confused about which, which type of reactant to make. And now, at the very end, you're taking out that middle 38 portion.

• 36:54Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:55Krishna Choudhary?

  And you get a huge asymmetry.

• 36:57Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yep, yep.

• 36:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Before, we had 6%, 38%, 56%. But the 38% is not creating any reactants. And so if we look at the reactant distribution, we only get 10% of reactants and 90% of the, the right version.

• 37:16Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 37:17Krishna Choudhary?

  10% of the left version, 90% of the right version.

• 37:20Lester Nare?

  Which is basically taking up all of the product that would've come out of the left-right, because effectively, it cannot, it cannot catalyze.

• 37:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, there's no catalysis happening. And so this is nonlinear.

• 37:31Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you're starting with 25%, 75%, and you're ending up with a 10% and a 90%. And specifically, this mixing mechanism is a multiplicative thing, right? Which is why we're getting that slope, right? If it was just an additive thing, that the slope would just change, but like, it would still be a straight line. The fact that it's multiplicative means that I'm getting a parabola, right?

• 38:01Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 38:01Krishna Choudhary?

  And that's why you've got a curve in that reaction kinetics.

• 38:07Lester Nare?

  Yep.

• 38:07Krishna Choudhary?

  That's the key distinction that's happening. This is the positive nonlinear effect. And this is the nonlinear part of the Nobel Prize discovery.

• 38:17Lester Nare?

  Exactly. So if we go back to the top here, right? The, um, the official citation is for the discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. So now we've identified, this is the first piece.

• 38:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the nonlinear effects, right? And this is a historic breakthrough. It's historic because many chemists didn't think it was possible. And now they start exploring this new phenomenon. Everyone in chemistry who cares anything about asymmetric catalysis starts exploring this. One of these chemists is Kenzo Soi at the Tokyo University of Science. And he comes up with the final link in that Nobel Prize citation. And before we get to that, let's do some housekeeping, because we haven't done that in a while, and I think we deserve it.

• 39:06Lester Nare?

  A quick opportunity to shill, a quick pause. So you can find all of the papers that we talk about and go through on the show at our website, ffppod.com. We do short clips and little bite-sized takes of some of the best science that we talk about on our socials, @FFPPod. And, you know, one of the best ways to help this show get seen by more people, the like, share, or comment. Share it with somebody you think would find it interesting. Five-star on Spotify or any of the podcast networks. Really helps us get the best science show on the planet out to more people. And I just want to note, I was so excited when I saw the announcement this morning,

• 39:49Lester Nare?

  because one of the, and you mentioned this earlier, one of the biggest unlock episodes for me, in terms of my mental framework around the sciences, was when we talked about, due to the unfortunate passing of Chen Ningyong at the end of last year, we have an episode, "The Man Who Unlocked Symmetry." If any of these concepts are super interesting to you and you wanna know more, whether it's about parity violation or the birth of Yang Mills, that episode is an absolute banger.

• 40:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it really is. And the one thing that I wanna mention about that episode and its distinction with this one is the fact that physics does care about the mirror world, right? In chemistry, as we said, you can create a Petri dish of both left-handed and right-handed stuff. And you might be thinking, well, you know, does everything in physics care about left-handed, right-handed or not? Like, in chemistry, it clearly doesn't. In physics, in fact, there is a way to tell between left-handed and right-handed stuff. And we do this great analysis that Richard Feynman actually originally did, where he talked about, you know, if we were to call up an alien, how would we tell him left versus right hands, right? We can't use chemistry.

• 41:04Krishna Choudhary?

  We can't be like, grow some glucose and then make it go through light and, and see which way the light turns. Because the glucose on Earth, sure, it's turning to the right-hand side, because glucose is right-handed here on Earth. But the alien is gonna grow crystals, and then like Louis Pasteur, he's gonna be like, well, there's two different types of crystals. And like, the, this type of crystal is going left-hand, this type of crystal is going right-hand. Or in the worst-case scenario, the alien has a left-handed version of life, right? He's still somehow eating glucose, but his version of glucose is all left-handed. And so he goes the other way, and he thinks his left is our right. Chemistry cannot make that distinction. Physics, on the other hand, can.

• 41:47Krishna Choudhary?

  Chen Ningyong was one of the key people who understood that. And C.S. Wu, the very famous Chinese physicist, she did not win the Nobel Prize very controversially. But she proved that that was in fact a fact of the universe, that parity violation exists in beta decay, where neutrons spit out a proton and an electron, but the electron only spins in one direction versus the other. It's an incredible episode. It's actually one of my favorites as well.

• 42:15Lester Nare?

  It's so good, and beta decay coming up again.

• 42:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we talked about beta decay yesterday.

• 42:20Lester Nare?

  Yesterday.

• 42:20Krishna Choudhary?

  So, yeah.

• 42:21Lester Nare?

  Okay, so with that said, we now have the nonlinear part of this 2026 chemistry Nobel. The next word in the Nobel description is autocatalysis. How do we get there?

• 42:33Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes. This is where we get into autocatalysis.

• 42:39Krishna Choudhary?

  The idea of autocatalysis is that the product participates in catalyzing the reaction that produces more of the product, that then catalyzes more of the reaction that produces more of the product. So as the product accumulates, you get this runaway reaction. And a signature of this type of reaction in reaction kinetics is as time goes on, you get kind of a sigmoid, where the first half is like exponential, because the more and more products you get, you start blowing up. But as you start running out of the reactants, you reach a baseline where all of the reactants are finally taken care of, right? Life has a bunch of this type of autocatalysis. For example, there's several cycles that

• 43:21Krishna Choudhary?

  we have in life where, you know, you create a particular product, and then that particular product feeds back into the cycle itself. The Krebs cycle in mitochondria is a great one. The Calvin cycle in photosynthesis is a great one. So, life does this all the time, right? And you can imagine, like, kind of makes sense, right? If you've got a workshop that builds tools, and then the tools build themselves, then you've got this thing going.

• 43:48Lester Nare?

  This is not recursive self-improvement, and we're not talking about AI.

• 43:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we're not talking about AI, although that is also a runaway effect that we should be certainly concerned about. In any case, so Soi and his collaborators, they start exploring reactions in which organozinc reagents add to aldehydes to make alcohols. Let's take this particular reaction here. This is an asymmetric catalytic addition of dimethylzinc, which is the Me2Zn. Me is the methyl, so dimethyl group. This is being attached to a chiral ligand on the left-hand side. The pH is a phenyl group, that's a C6H5, okay? When you scrutinize this thing, look at the product. The product also has a phenyl

• 44:36Krishna Choudhary?

  with OH. It's a bit different from the reactant, but it's also kind of similar to the thing that is catalyzing the reaction at the very top, because it's got a phenyl group, an OH group, and extra carbon. And the carbon, if you can somehow attach it to the N-benzene feridine, the NBN over there, then perhaps you could make more of this stuff, okay? So this is kind of a, like, you know, maybe there's something here. This sparks an idea, right? Perhaps you can design a reaction where the catalyst forms itself. Now, at this time, early 1990s, there's several known examples of autocatalytic reactions, but none that are asymmetric, okay? There's several reactions of this thing doing it, but we

• 45:21Krishna Choudhary?

  need something that prefers one hand over the other, right? And by experimenting with many different molecules, Soi succeeds in finding a chiral substance called five-perametal alkanol. I almost said alcohol. And chemists with their, dude, I remember organic chemistry, like, if you put down alcohol and not alkanol, which by the way, the H kind of looks like an N, like you got a zero. So, oh my god, I hate it, Orgo. But in any case, five-perametal alkanol is a chiral substance that Soi finds that can create itself. And in a publication

• 46:01Krishna Choudhary?

  in 1995 in Nature, he describes this revolutionary experiment, asymmetric autocatalysis and the amplification of inantiomeric excess of a chiral molecule. Banger title. For anyone who is in the field, like, this is like, oh, you did it, right? And this is literally like, the word for word, some of the stuff that the Nobel Committee is citing, right? Asymmetric autocatalysis. So, great title, 1995. It's not, it's not the end of his work, because this is, this is kind of halfway there. It starts with a 2% excess of one inantiomer, and ends up with an excess of 87%. That's pretty good, but, you know, the reaction is not what life does, because in life, you start with a little bit of excess, and you gotta get to 100%.

• 46:46Lester Nare?

  It's the Riemann hypothesis. We gotta rule out all of the non-trivial zeros.

• 46:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:53Lester Nare?

  And even when you get to 100%,

• 46:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, a little different, a little different.

• 46:55Lester Nare?

  A little different.

• 46:56Krishna Choudhary?

  But at least this is like some statistical type thing, right? We're getting close. We're getting close, right? So, another eight years, Soi's lab just continues their search, and they finally find the ultimate autocatalytic process. In 2003, they publish in the American Chemical Society Journal. This journal, by the way, is just one of the goats for chemistry. In last year's episode, if you look back, a lot of the MOFs, the Metal Organic Framework Papers, came out in the American Chemical Society Journal. So, like, kind of goes under the radar compared to like, nature, science, but this thing

• 47:36Lester Nare?

  We see you.

• 47:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, we see, this thing is a heavy hitter. This is the first time that anyone had successfully created chirality from non-chiral combinations of molecules since the dawn of life. This is where he got to 100% chiral.

• 47:49Lester Nare?

  Sheesh, unbelievable.

• 47:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay?

• 47:51Lester Nare?

  Since the dawn of life.

• 47:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, since the dawn of life, this is the first time. It's called the Soai Reaction, and it is considered by chemists as the most elegant chemical experiment ever conducted, by some chemists.

• 48:07Lester Nare?

  I just want to note, the pronunciation of the last name, Soi, being the one that, like, created this, is also just like, a sort of aesthetically interesting naming convention. It's like, Soi and I only, no, anyway.

• 48:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, I think that is, that is quite funny. I mean, it's considered one of the most elegant chemical experiments ever conducted, which, that is a high bar, you know, to meet. So, here's what's happening. When you start the catalytic process, you've got both inantiomers that are present, but a tiny excess of just one creates 100% excess of that one. And that's because, effectively, what's happening is, one inantiomer takes over the entire reaction. The left-hand side creates only left-hand catalysts, and the right-hand side creates only right-hand catalysts. But if you've got a tiny imbalance, the left-hand sides create way more than the right-hand side, which is gonna then create way more, which

• 49:05Krishna Choudhary?

  is then gonna create way more. So, you start out with something like 0.00005%. After the first run, you get all the way to 57%.

• 49:17Lester Nare?

  Unbelievable.

• 49:18Krishna Choudhary?

  After the second run, you get to 99%, and after the third run, you get to 99.5%. It's a runaway reaction because of autocatalysis. That is the key. The thing is creating itself, which is then creating itself, right?

• 49:33Lester Nare?

  This is, I remember seeing this image in the Nobel Materials, and, you know, without necessarily connecting the dots, understanding, like, looking at this runaway, in three runs, in three rounds, with how small your starting point was, in terms of the imbalance, clearly was going to be important.

• 49:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Lester Nare?

  Now, the connection as to how and why is fascinating.

• 49:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this is, it's like, one part in, what, 10,000, I think, if I'm doing the math right? One part in 10,000 is leading to, in three runs, 99.5%, almost at 100%, right? Just, one of them is just dominating, just because of the chance

• 50:12Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 50:13Krishna Choudhary?

  of beginning asymmetry.

• 50:15Lester Nare?

  And the, the, the small scale of that chance asymmetry at the beginning is very small.

• 50:21Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. It could have gone the other way, right? And then, in which case, we would have had a lot of the, of the left-hand side.

• 50:26Lester Nare?

  It's, this is, this is so good. And so now, we've kind of gotten to the point where we understand now all of the component parts

• 50:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly.

• 50:38Lester Nare?

  of the description. And just to say it one more time, the nonlinear effects,

• 50:41Krishna Choudhary?

  That was Kagan.

• 50:43Lester Nare?

  That was Kagan, Kagan.

• 50:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Kagan, yeah, sorry.

• 50:46Lester Nare?

  No, no, and then, and then if it's not, you can let us know in the comments.

• 50:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, please.

• 50:51Lester Nare?

  And then autocatalysis, which is what creates this, this runaway, in asymmetric organic synthesis, which means the inputs have that slight asymmetry, and it only, it doesn't always have to have a slight asymmetry, but it only requires a slight asymmetry in this example.

• 51:09Krishna Choudhary?

  To then create this 100% runaway.

• 51:11Lester Nare?

  Runaway reaction. And this is fascinating for a lot of reasons. Obviously, we made the connection earlier to how, you know, a couple of things, but one of the notes was that this changes how we make medicines.

• 51:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 51:26Lester Nare?

  Or pharmaceuticals. So how does, how does that connect to the impacts now that we have this understanding?

• 51:32Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and this leads to, like, you know, some of why chemists are so motivated by this. The aim is to produce inantiomers that are as pure as possible. For example, in pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical manufacturing, you want a particular type of handedness for the drug that you're making. You don't want to do Louis Pasteur, where you've got both sides. The importance of achieving this has been shown by the Thalidomide, the Thalidomide scandal of the 1960s. I don't know if you're aware of this.

• 52:02Lester Nare?

  No.

• 52:03Krishna Choudhary?

  I was not. But this is, this is an incredibly dark time in chemistry, in pharmaceuticals, and in the world at large. Like, aside from war, this is one of the worst disasters in history, that I hadn't really heard about, which I was really surprised by. So this is the Thalidomide scandal of the 1960s, when thousands of children were affected by birth defects caused by a sedative, Thalidomide. It was widely given to pregnant women to treat morning sickness. It's, it's actually incredible that, like, there's so little testing on pregnant women to create such a tragedy. Tens of thousands of people were affected. And when researchers analyzed what had happened, they'd realized that it was

• 52:48Krishna Choudhary?

  an active substance, the mirror image was causing the harm, right? They, both mirror images were in the drug, and while one of the, one of the mirror images was actually creating the sedative version, the other mirror image was causing these defects. And I want to take a brief note here and talk about why the world at large was very much affected by the Thalidomide scandal. Tens of thousands, I'm talking literally, tens of thousands of birth defects. The US was spared because of Frances Oldham Kelsey. And if you go back to that photo that we had,

• 53:28Krishna Choudhary?

  Frances Oldham Kelsey is the hero in our story for America because she was a pharmacologist working for the US Food and Drug Administration. She blocked the drug's approval in the United States despite heavy pressure from the manufacturer Grunenthal, which was a German pharmaceutical company. They were trying to pressure the FDA to approve this thing. She saw the writing on the wall in early clinical studies that others had kind of just hand waved as like, "Oh, that's just a hand of God, like chant stuff." She was looking at the data going, "No, no, there's clearly an effect here. I don't know what you guys are talking about."

• 54:07Krishna Choudhary?

  She received a lot of pressure from lobbyists, from like, you know, I can imagine like as a woman at the time in the 1960s in the Food and Drug Administration as a scientist trying to block approval, but you know, it took her and it largely spared the US from this crisis. There are several other countries that are still dealing with this. Japan, Australia, a lot of Europe. These are developed nations that have their own versions of the Food and Drug Administration, but somehow the pressure from Grunenthal, like actually, you know, they succumbed to that pressure. We did not because of her. And you know, there's a photo of President John F. Kennedy giving her the President's

• 54:50Krishna Choudhary?

  Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. It highlights why the FDA is important. I want to bring this up in today's climate where apparently we're just making decisions with the FDA that don't make sense to me, don't make sense to a lot of trained scientists. I just wanted to show that this is one of those situations where you really need independent thinkers in our government to make informed decisions. America was spared from that crisis. When the next crisis comes, we need someone like Frances Oldham Kelsey to do that again.

• 55:30Lester Nare?

  And just to piggyback on that, I think this also highlights the importance of not allowing commercial influence in sort of public health decisions.

• 55:43Krishna Choudhary?

  100%.

• 55:44Lester Nare?

  As well as research and R and D decisions, there needs to be a healthy tension there. And this is a perfect example of you don't want it to become too late because you've allowed sort of this runaway corporatism to infect civic institutions to their own benefit for the sake of shareholder value.

• 56:10Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Lester Nare?

  At the expense of a potential catastrophe that can last generations.

• 56:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes.

• 56:16Lester Nare?

  And that's, these decisions can last generations.

• 56:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Right. And these countries are still dealing with it to this day. I think it was only the last decade when that German company.

• 56:24Lester Nare?

  Decade?

• 56:25Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, very good. Yeah, but only in the last decade was that company actually apologizing for what they did, which is like 50 years later.

• 56:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 56:35Krishna Choudhary?

  Really? And a lot of, I mean, I went in and a deep dive on this. A lot of like the original scientists and shareholders and the CEO of that company in the 1960s that was peddling this thing, they were just trying to, you know, avoid any sort of responsibility. They avoided responsibility for most of their life until most of them had passed away and then they had the repercussions. It's, if you guys want to like, you know, go into a deep dive about like how badly things can go wrong, you should look up the thalidomide scandal of the early 1960s. But I think this highlights something about drug development, which is chirality is a practical design and quality control issue, right? If two mirror images interact differently with the body, then the manufacturer needs

• 57:18Krishna Choudhary?

  to understand which form is being made, how much of it is being made, and how we can actually create asymmetric synthesis where we can build a preference of one over another, right? Understanding these nonlinear effects helps researchers interpret experiments, identify active species, and decide how to actually improve selectivity. So this year's Nobel Prizes, the work that they've done is very much important for drug development at large.

• 57:48Lester Nare?

  This is, it's so interesting. I think, you know, I've talked about this previously. You know, my dad has worked in stage one drug discovery for quite some time. And this is one of those things where, you know, even in the course of his career, the change of understanding has impacted what he's been able to do and work on. And it's always touching on stories that have a tangential connection to allow me to understand his work a little bit better. I always find gratifying.

• 58:15Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Lester Nare?

  And I know you feel the same when, when we talk about stuff and the other category for you as well. But I think this now brings us back to the last missing piece from the beginning of the episode setup, which comes back to this age old question about life. So how does this now, you know, what does all of this say about why biology is homo chiral? It only has one chirality. Like, how does this now connect to that bigger question?

• 58:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, right. And you might think that this sort of answers it, right? Because the SOI reaction shows that you can start with a small asymmetry and get, you know, 100% one way or the other. Now, that is certainly true, and it has a lot of compounding effects for drug development as we talked about and fundamental chemistry questions at large. But at the end of the day, the SOI reaction is artificial, and it is a bit different from the chemistry of life. It still awakens a new enthusiasm in chemists who want to understand life's origins, but the connection to life is limited in some sense. Because these experiments demonstrate that the chemical route from little or no handedness to a very strong preference for handedness, that is certainly possible.

• 59:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Whether the mechanism four billion years ago was exactly the SOI reaction or some other part, it's not entirely clear, right? I mean, there's the extreme case where life came from outer space and that already had a handedness. So then, you know, that answers the question.

• 59:49Lester Nare?

  Panstria.

• 59:50Krishna Choudhary?

  So, so.

• 59:51Lester Nare?

  Panstria.

• 59:52Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so origin of life is a, is a very, is a very different question, but this certainly gets to things that are possible, right? You know, it tells you that you don't need like an outside, like agent.

• 1:00:06Lester Nare?

  Invisible hand?

• 1:00:07Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, invisible hand, vitalism, like some mysterious force that's in life that creates these building blocks one way or the other. Now, around the world, researchers are taking the next step and they're trying to repeat SOI's achievement, but with the aim of producing homo chiral amino acids and sugars. Right now, we've done simple molecules. We'd like to make even more complicated molecules, but we need to be careful.

• 1:00:29Lester Nare?

  Okay.

• 1:00:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay? We do not want to make mirror life. And in the recent times, we've had a lot of like alarmist news coming out about mirror life.

• 1:00:43Lester Nare?

  Doomers? We have more doomers?

• 1:00:45Krishna Choudhary?

  We have a lot of doomers. There's AI doomers. The mirror life doomers have been around for a while. Okay? Ever since we figured out that life is chiral and we've been able to make asymmetric catalysis happen, there have been AI, there have been mirror life doomers that are telling us not to do it. This is just a few of the headlines. Mirror life is still hypothetical. Here's why it should probably stay that way. There was a news article in Nature that said, "How should mirror life research be restricted?" The debate heats up. My favorite one is, "Mirror life is a mass extinction risk we don't need to take." Okay? I want to go a little bit into, into, into some of this because, so what is mirror life?

• 1:01:24Krishna Choudhary?

  What it means is the molecules and the proteins that make up these organisms would be completely mirrored from the ones that we have. This would require mirrored sugars, mirrored DNA, mirrored proteins, like everything, literally everything that this particular life form that we create would have the opposite version. Okay? Now, this has issues if it is created and if it escapes the lab. Some really, really bad issues, okay? Because suppose you create a mirror bacterium, like a bacteria where everything is the opposite chirality from normal life. Okay?

• 1:02:09Krishna Choudhary?

  So that means the amino acids are right-handed, that means the sugars are left-handed, everything is opposite. What that means is that you can have a bacteria that proliferates, but there is no defense mechanism on the earth that is suited to combat this thing. The viruses, like the bacteriophages that prey on the bacteria, they require chiral mechanisms to get into the bacteria. Well, if the bacteria has the opposite handedness, the virus can't really screw itself into the bacterium and kill it.

• 1:02:44Lester Nare?

  It can't. The Lego blocks don't.

• 1:02:46Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah. A lot of our antibiotics are chiral in nature, and they require the specific chirality of the bacterial proteins to attach and then, and then destroy.

• 1:02:55Lester Nare?

  I.

• 1:02:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Now you got, now you've got, you know, there's, there's no predation, there's no effective predation. And the accompanying increase in the bacteria would create this runaway reaction because the bacteria would just start eating, suppose it's photosynthetic, right? It doesn't, it would just, like, all it needs is water, which is not chiral, carbon dioxide, which is not chiral, and sunlight, which is not chiral. And it would just create the opposite type of glucose, the opposite type of proteins. Boom, you get a runaway reaction, right? In humans, we've got an innate human immune system, and the first line of human defense in the immune system against microbial threats relies on a pattern of recognition where

• 1:03:38Krishna Choudhary?

  you've got antibodies reacting to the invaders, or you've got antigens, no, the antigens are the invaders, the antibodies react to them, recognize, and then you've got the second line of defense that characterizes, okay, we need to start an immune response. Well, if our antibodies do not recognize the antigens and they have no hope of recognizing the antigens.

• 1:04:02Lester Nare?

  Because they can't.

• 1:04:03Krishna Choudhary?

  Because you literally can't make the opposite chirality antibody.

• 1:04:07Lester Nare?

  Yeah, that's dangerous.

• 1:04:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:04:10Lester Nare?

  That's dangerous.

• 1:04:11Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, it's, this is getting weird, right? So, immune systems will go bad. Instead of causing standard infections, the mirror pathogen is going to act more like a cancer. Because we're not gonna even have an immune response to this thing. The mirror pathogen is just gonna go in and it's gonna start occupying space. It's gonna start reproducing and creating a runaway reproductive reaction. That's gonna use bodily energy resources and there's gonna be no existing countermeasures. This is a very scary prospect.

• 1:04:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So image mirror life is is really quite a danger.

• 1:04:51Lester Nare?

  OG doomers might be on to something there.

• 1:04:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, this is this is from way back and they they've been calling for bans on this thing for a very long time. Now, what's the current status? Now, mirror life does not exist and it can't form naturally because natural biology prefers one handedness. And mirror life is necessarily the other handedness.

• 1:05:11Lester Nare?

  Should we put a qualifier there that says on earth?

• 1:05:14Krishna Choudhary?

  On earth, I we should.

• 1:05:15Lester Nare?

  And just as a not that it's.

• 1:05:17Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Lester Nare?

  We haven't seen.

• 1:05:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Lester Nare?

  Extraterrestrial life at this point in time. But that's also a reason why bringing stuff back.

• 1:05:24Krishna Choudhary?

  Is not a good idea.

• 1:05:25Lester Nare?

  Is not a good idea as well.

• 1:05:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Yes, exactly. And and that's also a reason why bringing stuff there is not a good idea as well. Right? So that's why when we go to places like Europa to look for life, we better know that like all of our equipment is sterilized in some sense. Right? Because Europa could have the other handedness of life. Now, it's challenging to build mirrored life, right? You need to create a central dogma that is a mirrored central dogma. Like, for example, nobody's created a mirrored ribosome. Where all of the amino acids and all of the RNA are exactly the opposite type, let alone some major components like the TRNAs that are required for protein synthesis and things like that. You would need a mirrored DNA. You would need a mirrored RNA. You would need mirrored RNA polymerases.

• 1:06:11Krishna Choudhary?

  So all of this stuff needs to happen and like you'd really need to like try.

• 1:06:16Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:17Krishna Choudhary?

  You know?

• 1:06:17Lester Nare?

  Yeah. There's so many similarities with the ongoing AI safety conversation, just in terms of like there being two camps. People are like, this shouldn't happen. And then other folks saying, well, we don't even, we're not even close.

• 1:06:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Lester Nare?

  Right? It has that same dynamic.

• 1:06:36Lester Nare?

  Part of the challenge with things like this is because we are increasing in our ability to do scientific innovation generally. AI enabled or not. The gap time between we don't have any of the component parts to having the component parts. It's not necessarily the the time compression there is is non trivial.

• 1:06:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly, yeah. And so right now, the best we've got is like a scientific moratorium. Okay, in 2024, there was an international coalition of 38 leading scientists, including some Nobel laureates. They published this landmark call for a halt. And what they're effectively doing is like a taboo strategy. Like, I'm not gonna review papers that, you know, forward mirror life. Maybe we don't fund research that forwards mirror life. There's major international bodies that recently issued critical reports like the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee, the World Health Organization, the UN Secretary General's Scientific Advisory. But like, you know?

• 1:07:34Lester Nare?

  Yeah, we've seen how the in the current world environment geopolitically and otherwise. Unfortunately, these entities that are meant to create collective action have struggled.

• 1:07:44Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:46Lester Nare?

  And we've seen a breakdown, unfortunately, in the ability to get global collaboration on a lot of different things.

• 1:07:54Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Lester Nare?

  So we're kind of in a tough spot.

• 1:07:55Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, and and it's complicated by the fact that not everyone even agrees that we should just like sweepingly ban this thing. There's some synthetic biologists that argue that a blanket ban would be premature because we're so far away from it. And, you know, mirror image peptides and biomolecules, they can currently be used to design safer, highly stable drugs. You know, beneficial mirror molecules can make better drugs effectively. And that's very far away from living self replicating mirror cells.

• 1:08:24Lester Nare?

  Sounds a lot like Sam Altman.

• 1:08:26Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, yeah. I don't think there's a whole like USA versus China debate here, right? Because I think everyone agrees that let's not do this.

• 1:08:35Krishna Choudhary?

  But there's there's no like supremacy, mirror life supremacy going on. But but there's there's some like debate about, you know, maybe not a blanket ban. It kind of reminds me of, you know, when we were talking about what Sudiparik, the CEO of AAAS. He was, he was talking about how some of the advice that he gave the Senate Scientific Advisory Committee was used on the floor of Congress to like steer legislation. One of the examples that he gave us, and we'll have the interview coming out soon. He said that, you know, there was a ban for any chimeras of of human animal or animal animal organisms.

• 1:09:18Krishna Choudhary?

  Well, the blanket ban would stop any genetic modification from happening, right? And that's that's a huge ban.

• 1:09:26Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? So there's like room to do this. But at the same, at the same time, like, like, animal animal chimeras are not an existential risk for all life on earth. So the fact that like right now, we're just, we're just, oh, it's taboo. Like, let's not do it, guys. I think we should have a little, I think we should get our act together here, guys. Like, the more I researched this, I was like, how are we just, how are we just like, oh, let's not do it, guys? That's like our best strategy?

• 1:10:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 1:10:01Lester Nare?

  And it's fascinating because once you get into the details to understand the the what's functionally happening.

• 1:10:06Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Lester Nare?

  It's clear.

• 1:10:08Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Lester Nare?

  Where the risk comes from.

• 1:10:09Krishna Choudhary?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:10Lester Nare?

  It's a lot easier to see the risk than some of the RSI debate, although I am more doomer than non doomer on recursive self improvement. But I think the it requires more infrastructure around it. This is like, once it's created and it's out.

• 1:10:25Krishna Choudhary?

  No, it's like, it's really bad.

• 1:10:27Lester Nare?

  It's really bad.

• 1:10:27Krishna Choudhary?

  It's really bad. All you need is like one bacteria.

• 1:10:30Lester Nare?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:10:30Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:10:30Lester Nare?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:32Krishna Choudhary?

  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna end on a lighter note than existential dread. Before we end, I wanna mention that I'm pretty sure I caught a mistake. By the Nobel Committee's press material.

• 1:10:44Lester Nare?

  Uh oh.

• 1:10:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Okay, so on the left hand side is the popular science background. That's an image of the SAWI chemical reaction. The intermediary is the left and right versions of the catalyst that then, you know, auto catalyze themselves and create the runaway reaction. And if you notice on the on the left hand side, the colored versions, this is the popular science. So, you know, they they got some graphic artists to like make this version. They're showing the left version of it. And then the right version of it, it's flipped.

• 1:11:18Lester Nare?

  Yes.

• 1:11:19Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? Okay. But let's look at the, let's look at the molecule in a little bit greater detail, okay? If this molecule was completely flat, then all I'd have to do is just flip the left into the right. And then I would, those two are not in antumors if if they're completely flat. The fact that they're not flat comes from the fact that on the left, there's a dotted line that's attaching the zinc group to the organic molecule. And on the right hand side, there's a solid line that is attaching the zinc to the solid molecule. Now, in chemistry, the convention is dotted line means it's moving away and solid line means it's moving towards.

• 1:12:01Krishna Choudhary?

  But if you're flipping it, then the the the zinc that's away on the left hand side, as I turn it and flip it, the zinc is going to come towards me on the right hand side. Those two are the same molecule. Right? In the scientific background, they were a bit more careful because I think they just copy and pasted the image from the paper itself. And there, it's showing the left and the right versions of that molecule.

• 1:12:34Krishna Choudhary?

  It's not flipped.

• 1:12:35Lester Nare?

  Right.

• 1:12:36Krishna Choudhary?

  And one of them is dotted going away, one of them is solid going towards.

• 1:12:40Lester Nare?

  Uh oh.

• 1:12:41Krishna Choudhary?

  Right?

• 1:12:42Lester Nare?

  I I see it.

• 1:12:43Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so on the left hand side, what would have been correct is both of them are either dotted or you don't flip and one of them is dotted, one of them is solid.

• 1:12:52Lester Nare?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:12:52Krishna Choudhary?

  You see what I'm saying?

• 1:12:53Lester Nare?

  I see exactly what you're saying because by having it flipped in this orientation, you're actually changing the in and outness.

• 1:12:57Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:58Lester Nare?

  Of of the zinc.

• 1:13:00Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, the zinc is going away from me on the left, but if I flip it to the right, it would be coming towards me. It's the same molecule. On the other hand, if it's the opposite version, then as I flip it, it would be a dotted line on the right as well.

• 1:13:14Lester Nare?

  We're awaiting comments.

• 1:13:16Krishna Choudhary?

  Right, so if there's any chemists out there that like have some justification for this, like, let me know. But I'm pretty sure the Nobel Committee made a mistake here.

• 1:13:24Lester Nare?

  The Nobel Committee has been very quiet since this tweet.

• 1:13:27Krishna Choudhary?

  You know, so.

• 1:13:28Lester Nare?

  But but given what we've gone through, it makes total sense.

• 1:13:31Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:31Lester Nare?

  Why, why these are representing different things.

• 1:13:34Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, yeah. On the right hand side, we're we're seeing true chirality.

• 1:13:37Lester Nare?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Krishna Choudhary?

  Right? We're seeing the inantiomers that are left handed and right handed. On the left hand side, we're actually seeing the same molecule.

• 1:13:44Lester Nare?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:45Krishna Choudhary?

  Because all you're doing is rotating it.

• 1:13:47Lester Nare?

  Uh oh, that's a good one. In case people didn't think we did our homework.

• 1:13:53Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Lester Nare?

  This is proof positive.

• 1:13:56Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Lester Nare?

  That we spend the time.

• 1:13:58Krishna Choudhary?

  Yeah, so in the comments, right? FFP pod greater than Nobel Committee. Let's go. Or or I'm wrong and let me know.

• 1:14:09Lester Nare?

  We have spent a lot of time this week waking up early, putting all these materials together so we could have had daily drops with the detailed understandings of each of the moving parts. I just want to quickly kind of go through what we've talked about today. So we started with two hands that cannot be made identical by rotating them. From that small geometric difference, we reached a problem that connects the molecules in medicine to the building blocks of life. Pastore, we Pastore, made molecular symmetry experimentally visible. This was our wine example earlier. Kagan showed why the behavior of mixed-handed catalyst need not be a simple average. And so I demonstrated a reaction

• 1:14:52Lester Nare?

  in which self-production and amplification work together. This non-linearity, we talked about then, this autocatalysis. A tiny starting imbalance does not always stay tiny. Fascinating. Under the right chemical conditions, it can shape almost the entire outcome. That is the idea behind this year's Chemistry Nobel, and it leaves an excellent question open. Which other chemical systems can turn a small beginning into a strongly ordered result, which is what we just ended on? Maybe we need to be a little bit careful when it comes to some of the mirror life stuff. If there's a step in the story that you would like us to unpack further, in addition to the FFP Greater Than Nobel Committee in the comments,

• 1:15:34Lester Nare?

  please let us know. Again, all the papers and the sources are available at ffppod.com. On socials, you can get all of our clips, @FFPpod. Oh, look, our little "Give it a like" just popped up on the screen for those watching on YouTube. That timing was quite nice. Look, that was no hands. Look, ma, no hands. I want to take a, I know this is running a little long, but I want to just take a last moment, since this is going to be our last episode from the Nobels. I want to give a huge, big shout out to our resident PhD, Krishna Choudhary this week, who's been an absolute champion. These are extremely dense and complex issues. As I mentioned, we are up all morning, recording first thing

• 1:16:18Lester Nare?

  after several hours, to deliver a deeply technical but conversational and approachable episode right when it happens, so you can really get this immediately. Krishna is a big part, not only in every episode, but especially in Nobel Prize week, for us to be able to deliver the correct and accurate and still enjoyable result here. And, you know, I really just want to give you some flowers. It's a hugely challenging thing for us to accomplish this in this time period with just the two of us, and to get it out

• 1:16:59Lester Nare?

  to you with high production value, making us look pretty. So, you know, in the comments, if you made it to the end of the episode, please give Krishna a big shout out, because this is, this is real work, and it's a pleasure to be able to produce this show alongside one of my favorite science communicators. My name is Lester Nare, alongside, again, one of my favorite people, Krishna. Is there anything from the week that you want to just end on, before we let the people go here?

• 1:17:30Krishna Choudhary?

  I want to end on the fact that, you know, I think Nobel, I think in a grand scheme, if we zoom out, the Nobel Prizes are a great way to recognize scientists for a lifelong career in advancing a particular field. But prizes aren't everything, and science is so much bigger than the few individuals that get the Nobel Prize. Even in today's episode, we talked about all of the stuff that led up to it. In the Ice Cube episode, I mean, there's 450 people involved in Ice Cube. Only one person got the Nobel Prize. It was his baby, and it kind of makes sense. But let's not forget about all of the scientists

• 1:18:14Krishna Choudhary?

  that work for creating science. You know, they're just as much heroes as the Nobel Prize winners, and that's why a big part of the show is just highlighting science as it happens throughout the year.

• 1:18:28Lester Nare?

  It's a team sport. This is not tennis. And again, we do always try to, for example, when we show the papers, show the whole author byline, so everyone gets that recognition. Because I think it's a really good point. We are trying to create an entry point into this to make it enjoyable. But we are extremely grateful to the entire research community, and we are trying to elevate your stories in this love letter to science.

• 1:18:56Krishna Choudhary?

  And one thing I will also say is that, you know, the getting up at 2:30 in the morning, it's not just me. You're doing it too. And, you know, the fact that we can, like, produce this thing, release a day of, release a bunch of social clips the day of, that's, that's all Lester. And, you know, be sure to look at, like, all of the advancements that we've had in our automatic caption creation and things like that. Pretty cool stuff.

• 1:19:24Lester Nare?

  We are one of the best teams in science entertainment, and we are trying to build off the shoulders of giants, of the many researchers who don't get their stories told as often as other things. And so it's a pleasure for us both to be able to bring the show to you. For many of the new listeners, we have a great back catalog. Check it out. We are going to go get some rest. Next episode will be our interview episode from the Golden Goose Awards, which was, I can't believe that was last week, when we were in DC. We'll have three interviews with all of the awardees that won this year, and that will be followed

• 1:20:05Lester Nare?

  up by our interview with AAAS CEO, Sudip Parikh. And we may do a Halloween special, but we haven't decided. We're going to take a couple days for breather. We appreciate you all and FFP Nation for joining us, and we will see you all next week.