Guangdong-Technion Leadership in Science and Technology Popular Lecture by Prof. Ron Naaman-Weizmann Institute of Science

Title

The Origin of Life and Chirality 生命的起源与手性

Speaker

Ron Naaman

Professor Emeritus of The Weizmann Institute of Science
Fellow of the American Physical Society
Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society
Member of Academia Europaea

Host

Prof. Zuoti Xie (GTIIT MSE)

Date & Time

Mar. 08 2022, Tuesday, 19:00pm-20:00pm

Venue

E310 (Educational Building 3rd floor)

Language

English(Simultaneous interpretation will be available)

How to join:

Scan the QR code or click here to join the lecture

Free snacks will be provided at 18:40 pm

Abstract

How Life started is a long-standing question, to which a full answer is not available yet. Part of the problem in answering the question is the lack of clear evidences. An important approach toward finding an answer is to consider all the constrains that had to exist when Life were formed. One such constrain is the homochirality in Life. Chirality is a symmetric property that means that each chiral molecule appears in two forms-enantiomers that are mirror images of each other. Chiral molecules are playing important role in Life, since proteins and DNA are chiral. However, in Life all the chiral molecules appears almost exclusively as one enantiomer. It will be shown how this fact can help in limiting the possibilities of paths towards the formation of Life.

Bio

Ron Naaman earned his BSc in 1973 from Ben-Gurion University and his PhD in 1978 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in California, and spent a year in the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University. In 1981, he joined the Weizmann Institute and in 1991 he became a Full Professor. He was the recipient of the Kolthof Award from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technolog (2014), was honored by a special issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry (2013). He received the Erasmus Mundus research scholarship at the Technical University in Dresden. and was the recipient of the Israel Vacuum Society Research Excellence Prize in 2011. In 2007, he was the Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry Lecturer of the Chemical Society of Japan. In 2018 he got the Israel Chemical Society prize for excellent research and in 2020 he got the Humboldt-Meitner Prize. Ron is a fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the Royal Chemical Society,  and a member of Academia Europaea.