Daily briefing: Chemistry Nobel goes to mirror-molecule researchers

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Chemistry Nobel for ‘handed’ molecules

Chemists Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have won this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on a long-standing mystery: how can living organisms create molecules that are just one of two possible mirror-image variants? In the 1980s, Kagan showed how catalysts can amplify a small asymmetry in handedness. And in the 1990s, Soai demonstrated that a one-handed molecule, produced in a reaction, can become its own catalyst, driving even greater asymmetry. Together they provided clues as to how natural reactions in living organisms might overwhelmingly produce just one type of mirror-image molecule.

Nature | 5 min read

‘A surprise, but a good one’

I watched today’s chemistry prize announcement with a bevy of colleagues from the Nature chemistry journals, and the consensus in that room was that the winning work was a surprise, but a good one. Across the chemosphere, there was a lot of appreciation for the fact that we don’t have to debate, this year, if the work was ‘really biology, rather than chemistry’. And I heard several admiring mentions of chemist Donna Blackmond. Her work explores the mechanistic details of asymmetric organic catalysis and many thought she would also have been a worthy winner. And of course we were all delighted that Kenso Soai’s seminal 1995 paper, on what’s today known as the Soai reaction, was published in Nature (especially after seeing our beloved rival Science get a special mention in yesterday’s physics prize announcement).

Flora Graham, chief editor, Nature Briefing

Watch me talk to Nature Podcast host Benjamin Thompson about the prize in a video sneak preview of the podcast (the full episode is out in a couple of hours — get it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube Music, or use the RSS feed.).

News

The top cancer success stories

Seventy-one percent of people with cancer in the United States live for at least five years after diagnosis, up from 49% in the late 1970s, says a new report. Highlights include huge strides against lung cancer and childhood leukaemias. In some cases, the numbers tell a nuanced story: the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer is now nearly 98% — a figure so high that it suggests some of the tumours were not malignant to start with, says cancer epidemiologist Rebecca Siegel.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: American Association for Cancer Research report

Sharks have surprisingly sharp hearing

Blacktip sharks (Carcharhinus limbatus) can hear and respond to sounds up to 74 metres away — beyond the radius that scientists thought the animals’ hearing was restricted to. Researchers found that the sharks often turned sharply away from speakers playing certain frequencies of noise, which suggests they could tell where it was coming from. A response at this distance “suggests that they are detecting the particle motion associated with sound”, which hasn’t been observed in sharks before, says zoologist and study co-author Stephen Kajiura.

ScienceAlert | 4 min read

Reference: Integrative Organismal Biology paper

Image of the week

In hospital isolation wards, health workers who treat people with Ebola must don time-consuming and uncomfortable protective suits. Intensive-care physician Richard Kojan and his colleagues developed the CUBE (emergency biosecurity chamber for epidemics), which allows them to treat highly contagious people in the field without the stifling suits. The 9-metre-square room can be set up in 90 minutes. “When we introduced the CUBE, we invited patients’ relatives into the facilities to see their family members through the plastic walls of the unit,” says Kojan. “It had never been possible to see and spend time with their loved ones before. This has had a huge social impact and helped to resolve tensions.” (Nature | 9 min read)

Read more in Nature Spotlight: Infectious diseases. (Elie BIGABA / ALIMA)

Features & opinion

The great neurogenesis debate

A growing body of evidence hints that the human brain can produce new nerve cells throughout a person’s life, challenging the long-held belief that people are born with all the neurons they’ll ever have. If that’s true, our brains could have an enduring ability to repair and regenerate. But neuroscientists remain divided, and influential papers have come down on both sides of the argument. Still, some think that the evidence is strong enough to shift focus onto potential applications of neurogenesis, such as treating neurodegenerative disease.

Nature | 12 min read

‘They made the science their own’

Earlier this year, a team of nanoscientists visited a local primary school to give a lesson on their work. To give the kids a sense of just how small ‘nano’ is, a teacher wrote 0.000000001 on a whiteboard. The children quickly adorned the number with a face, antennae and legs — the ‘nanopillar’ was born. The student “made the science their own”, the team writes. The group uses these visits both to inspire young children and to test themselves: “if we cannot explain our research to a second grader, then we probably do not understand it as well as we think we do”, they say.

Nature Nanotechnology | 5 min read

Could you tell the world about your research in one minute or less? You could win the Science in Shorts challenge, run by Springer Nature in collaboration with Merck. Up to ten winners will each pocket €5,000 (US$5,800), and entrants must have authored at least one peer-reviewed paper within the past two years. All the details are here, and the deadline is 2 December.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, chief editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Jacob Smith

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