Log #15
'Sup?
I have almost finished writing the paper for the ostracod project I have been working on for quite some time now. I do not think I have ever had to rewrite anything from scratch so many times in my entire life. Of course, there is also a certain degree of inexperience involved, considering that this is my first paper. Incorporating all the different comments and suggestions coming from each co-author has turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated. Not because I disagree with their suggestions or anything, but because some of them concern such fundamental aspects of the work that they practically require the entire manuscript to be rewritten. Somehow, with the help of AI, I can manage to navigate the enormous body of literature available to me without having spent years conducting research in one particular field. And honestly, that is a wonderful thing. Especially for young researchers like myself. I cannot remember ever going over a piece of writing, a report, or a paper this many times before. Every time I read it, I find another mistake. Every new review brings another one. And the thing is, I do not even necessarily have to do all of this... I just do it. To be perfectly frank, I am not even enjoying the process. I suppose I spent my entire childhood idealizing science in a rather misguided, idealized way. Had I known I would have to deal with all of this, I might have chosen a simpler, less troublesome path. Besides taking up an enormous amount of your time and forcing you to deal with all sorts of tedious things, I think the most painful aspect of this profession is how it distances you from other people. Or rather, how you end up distancing yourself from them. It is not that people are moving away from you; you are the one pushing them away. Or perhaps it is the other way around: perhaps being this kind of person is precisely what makes you see this profession as the ideal one. I suspect the latter might be more applicable to me. Despite being an extremely emotional person, I find it incredibly difficult to form attachments to people. For reasons I have never been able to understand, I simply cannot stop being pessimistic, and I cannot seem to pull myself out of this endless cycle of depression and unhappiness. I keep hoping that things will improve with time, while somehow continuing to become an increasingly sentimental and emotional person. I feel terribly alone.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai for their work on asymmetric organic synthesis. Chirality is something I have become particularly interested in, largely through following Furkan Öztürk's work, so naturally I paid special attention to this year's Chemistry Prize. I found Soai's work especially fascinating. Because the subject is chirality. Think of your left and right hands. They are mirror images of one another, yet no matter how you try, you cannot make them perfectly overlap. Some molecules behave in exactly the same way: despite having identical chemical compositions, they can exist in two different spatial arrangements that are mirror images of each other. What makes this particularly interesting is that life generally favours only one of these two forms. For example, virtually all amino acids that make up proteins have the L configuration. But why? If both forms can exist in nature, why does life favour one over the other?
The Soai reaction is closely related to this very question. Its most interesting feature is that it is autocatalytic, meaning that the product of the reaction also acts as a catalyst for its own production. Even if there is only a tiny difference between the amounts of the two chiral forms at the beginning, that difference can grow progressively larger as the reaction proceeds. In other words, an almost negligible asymmetry can reinforce itself until one chiral form becomes overwhelmingly dominant. Kagan's work has also been particularly important in understanding these kinds of nonlinear effects in asymmetric catalysis. What makes all of this even more fascinating to me is its connection to the origin of life. Because we still do not fully understand how homochirality—the preference for one particular chiral form of certain biological molecules—first emerged in living organisms. The Soai reaction offers a possible mechanism for how such an asymmetry could arise. Perhaps, before we can explain the origin of life, we first need to understand why molecules came to prefer their left hands over their right ones.
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